So I thought this was probably worthy of its own post, but my good friend Dixon Jones left a comment on my previous post about the value of SEO studies, here it is in all its glory:
Just incase anybody doesn’t know Majestic, they have for a long time operated the biggest publicly available index of links the web has seen.
Sure, Google have a bigger index – but that’s about it, and its certainly not publicly available, making Majestic your gold standard for backlink and SEO research:
Aside from the backlink research, they also have a nifty search engine in alpha, which has complete transparency in ranking factors – something of a breath of fresh air in our industry.
So, I’ll put the question to you, the rest of the SEO Community:
What amazing data points or research would you do with this resource?
I’ll collate the best ones and pass them onto Dixon, and lets see if we can crowdsource some SEO brilliance 🙂
Final note: while this post is in no way an advert for Majestic, if you’re an SEO that doesn’t use them, you’ve got some explaining to do!
All on page SEO being equal, what distinguishes one site from another if it ranks higher for a competitive keyword like “hotels in london” or “cheap car hire” or “shoes for women” or “kids clothes”?
Thanks Ralph!
I’ve been thinking about turning that round the other way, can we use similar link profiles but different rankings to determine the likelihood of other factors being at play – and identify those?
For instance, over a huge dataset, splicing Majestic data with raw ranking data, can we find anomalous ranking patterns that cant be explained by EITHER content or links, therefore pulling back the veil on “RankBrain” type modification?
It would be great to have an option to weight different factors up and down, A slider maybe; e.g. Segment on page factors and subsets thereof, off site factors too sitewides, singular mentions tlds etc – A build your own algo approach
Hey Rob!
I love that suggestion, reminds me of something we did internally at Orbitz a couple of years ago to build simulated link modules: we had a number of criteria and sliders, such as number of links, geographical distance, proximity of market type etc.
Everybody loves a slider, but in this case, its got genuine practical implementation benefits!
(Also, fixed the thing as per your other comment 😉 thanks!! 🙂 )
I want Google advanced search operators back, but they definitely won’t do it, maybe Majestic can handle it.
Need a linkfrom, linkto operator, site, intext, inurl, etc.. plus the ability to include/exclude on each operator. I know this is asking for a lot, and I don’t think Majestic allows for searching in the HTML of the pages they crawl, but, if they did do this it’s something I would pay for.