Yahoo siteexplorer data is out, is majestic a good replacement?

Hi FKing,

I am the marketing director at Majestic SEO - so let e tell you a bit about our data!

First things first - our data is our own. Unlike most tools, we don't rely on Yahoo's API and we don't scrape search results. We have been crawling the web for four years and we are currently crawling (or recrawling) half a billion URLs a day. Some as regularly as every hour, although we are currently updating the index you can see on Majesticseo.com about twice a month.

We are well financed and this is not the kind of kit you can generally run from a few webserevrs.

This means we have or know of more than 3 trillion links (Not including internal links, which we crawl for discovery but do not store). It is a massive dataset and our crawl capabilities are on a par with the biggest search engines. However, we currently only stor link data (including anchor text, page titles, discovery dates, and flags like redirections, liinks in frames etc). We also decided ages ago not to delete a link in our database just because it was removed from a website. We simply fag the link as deleted but leave it for you to analyze so you can see old link campaigns and partnerships if that is your wish.

With all this data, we do not have to be as protective as the search engines on sharing it. Indeed - we WANT to share the data - it's how we earn our income. We certainly returned much more backlink data than yahoo and have done fo years, as Yahoo only returned 1000 links max. With us, if you have the resources, we'll return millions, although this probably is only useful if you are really delving into our data for a specific domain.

If you want to REALLY anayze how good our data set is, then one way is to retrieve all the backlinks for a site you control, from Google Webmastertools (Not from Google proper as those results are way off). Then do the same with the MajesticSEO data. You can get data on your own sites free of charge blog.majesticseo.com/general/what-majesticseo-gives-you-for-free/ for how to do this if you get lost ). It of course varies fropm site to site, but we would hope we generally have 80-90% overlap with Google's data, and some links that we found independently of Google too. I would be interested to see if people's data agrees with our expectation.

Been using their free stuff for some time and I give them 2 thumps up.

Is yahoo going to do away with the site explorer 'site'? I have have an app that still gives me all the backlinks, its based on that functionality (not the API).