Announcing SEOmoz’s Index of the Web and the Launch of our Linkscape Tool
An Index of the World Wide Web – 30 Billion pages (and growing!), refreshed monthly, built to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape Linkscape – a tool enabling online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value.
New Features for PRO Membership – including more membership options, credits to run advanced Linkscape reports (for all PRO members), and more.
Since there's an incredible amount of material, I'll do my best to explain things clearly and concisely, covering each of the big changes. If you're feeling more visual, you can also check out our Linkscape comic, which introduces the web index and tool in a more humorous fashion:
The primary metric Linkscape exposes is mozRank (abbreviated mR), which we've been using internally with great success for the last few months. Like other link popularity metrics (Google's PageRank, Yahoo!'s old WebRank, Live's StaticRank, etc.), mozRank relies on the intuition that links are votes and that links from more important sources should carry more weight. As of today, mozRank isn't perfect, but it does include substantive differences from the algorithms discussed above (and those mentioned in academic papers) that helps mozRank to reward natural linking and discount many of the more flagrant manipulative link behaviors we found.
Linkscape also features lots of other valuable metrics including mozTrust (abbreviated mT and inspired by the TrustRank paper), a link popularity metric similar to mozRank, differing only in that it has a built-in bias towards trusted links and those that earn them); Domain mozRank (DmR) & Domain mozTrust (DmT) which calculate mozRank and mozTrust on the domain level (rather than just for individual pages) to learn about which domains carry the most link popularity and trust. There's also a host of individual attributes like image links, links with nofollow, links in noscript tags, links from the same IP address or c-block of IPs and many more. A full list of link attributes is available here.
What does this mean? It means that I can perform a search like this one:
I could go on about Linkscape for ages, and I probably will in future blog posts, pointing out all the shady links we've uncovered, which types of badges are most likely to be adopted from viral campaigns, and why the search engines might be ranking particular sites and pages where they do, but for now, I suggest you explore the tool on your own. The only final note I'll add is that Linkscape is still in beta, and this means it's somewhat rough right now - the index size, the values of mozRank and mozTrust, the depth of the crawl, and many more items will all be receiving upgrades over the weeks and months to come.
The SEOmoz Redesign
As you've probably noticed, the SEOmoz website has a new look and feel. We might be ironing out kinks for a few days, but I'm very happy with the new layout. We've moved to a wider width as our site stats indicate an extremely low percentage of users visiting on anything under a 1024x768 resolution. For our YOUmoz contributors, this means images can now be up to 630px in width and still fit into blog posts without breaking the formatting.
The re-design also includes a new toolbar for PRO members that provides quick access to all the PRO features when you're logged in:
Pages like our tools, guides (formerly articles), blog, YOUmoz and home page have all received their own overhauls, and we'd love to get your feedback.
Changes to PRO Membership
As I noted a few weeks ago, the price for PRO membership is rising. Starting today, PRO membership will cost $79/month or $799/year. This increase is primarily to help us support the Linkscape project, which (as you can imagine) has been, and will continue to be, an extremely expensive endeavor. PRO is still "risk-free" to try, and if you're unhappy with the service, you can cancel anytime in the first 30 days at no charge. For our 3,000+ legacy members, PRO membership will remain at the price it was when you signed up for as long as you remain a member.
We're also offering two new levels of membership - PRO Plus and PRO Elite, which feature greater access to Linkscape, the Q+A service and SEO Analytics (and planned access to new tools and featuers in the future). You can learn more about all the different levels on the Go PRO page.
As I mentioned in my previous post, folks who've signed up at the old rates are locked in - no need to worry, your subscription pricing won't rise. However, the current pricing is "introductory" and we are planning to raise the rate for PRO to $99/month, $999/year in December, when we launch... (see below)
The Future
There's so many exciting things we're planning to do, but maybe none of them are more valuable to SEOs than this:
We're still in the planning stages, but expect to have a beta version of a toolbar that plugs into Linkscape's API (and leverages many other SEO data sources and tools) available before 2009. There's much more to come, including a sister project to Linkscape (probably launching in Q1 of 2009) and lots more data in Linkscape itself, as well as refining the metrics and growing the index. We expect our first major update around Halloween (Oct. 31), and according to my sources, it should make the currently awesome data 10X awesomer (and yes, awesomer is a word - and a good one at that).
Special Thanks
A debt of gratitude is owed, first and foremost, to the incredible team at SEOmoz. There are 16 fantastic men and women putting up with me (up from only 7 a year ago!) and they have all invested not only a tremendous amount of effort, but a dedication and passion that shines through in the new site and tool. Deserving of specific thanks are Nick Gerner and Ben Hendrickson, ex-Microsofties and founders of their own startups who were excited enough by this project to set aside their pursuits and join our team. Together, they architected the remarkable web indexing and Linkscape projects and have produced something that is, in my opinion, revolutionary – truly disruptive technology for an arena sorely in demand.
I'd also like to extend a big thank you to the families, friends, husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends of the team here at SEOmoz. I know you haven't seen much of them over the past few months, and I hope that you're as proud of their accomplishments as I am. I can't promise things will slow down immediately, but we'll try to be a little less demanding of their time in the months to come.
Lastly, a debt of gratitude to Mystery Guest (whom I married just 3 weeks ago). Her constant support (she even edited this post at 1am in the morning) and unequivocal forgiveness of my every late night, nearly complete absence from the wedding planning process and substantial unavailability have been inspiring. I'm a very lucky guy.
BTW - For those hoping to give specific feedback about Linkscape, we've now got an official feedback thread on YOUmoz. You can also always email us - sitesupport@seomoz.org. Scott will also be posting three videos on the blog later today that help to explain more about Linkscape (and to help make up for last week's lack of a Whiteboard Friday).
www.seomoz.org
published @ October 6, 2008