Sunset SEO

There used to be one giant dominating the link information market and that giant was Yahoos Site Explorer. It used to be the only tool you needed up until the day the closed the project down. This spurred the other companies on the market to start working harder though and today it’s a battle between Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz and Majestic SEO and I’ve made a comparison of them.

Size of index

The most interesting part with tools like this is the size of their index. If you want the data to be useful you need a big index. Majestic holds 3 trillion pages (3.813.432.969.252) in their long term index while Open site Explorer holds the small amount of 159 billion. I also believe that the 159 billion might be a number that is actually a bit to high as I know that they’ve had indexing problems, I’d guess the number is even lower.

Quick comparison

• Majestic SEO: close to 4.000 Billion
• OSE: max 159 Billion

Update frequency

Another interesting point to compare is the update frequency. Majestic is way ahead here too with their Fresh Index that is updated daily. The Fresh Index of Majestic is roughly the same size as the total Index of the US competitor and as far as I can tell the OSE index is updated at best once every month.

Quick Comparison

• Majestic SEO: Daily updates to fresh index, monthly on total index
• OSE: At best monthly updates

Useful data

A tool is more than its index. How it gives you the data is also interesting and for a long time Domain Authority and Page Authority from Open Site Explorer has been the go to number. These attempts to recreate Page Rank in a more accessible way got very popular and Majestic didn’t really have anything to compete with. Up until last week. With the launch of Flow and Citation Majestic is now ahead even here as these correlate a lot better with Page Rank.

Quick comparison

• MajesticSEO: Citation Rank och Flow Rank
• OSE: Domain Authority och Page Authority

Cost

The price is of course always interesting. A silver package from Majestic costs $39.99 per month and a SEOmoz Pro (that you need for OSE) is $99. Sure, you get a few more tools in SEOmoz Pro but that’s not enough to sell me a product that is lagging way behind at a higher price.

Quick comparison

• MajesticSEO: $39.99 per month
• OSE: $99 per month

My conclusion

It’s obvious to me that Majestic is superior in almost every way, go with Majestic and skip Open Site Explorer. When it comes to On site tools you know which one is my favorite.

Finally, I first wrote this post in Swedish and after some requests I decided to translate to English. If you already follow my Swedish blog, sorry for giving you the same content twice.

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