Wil Reynolds
Over the past 13 years, Wil Reynolds has dedicated himself to doing two things well: driving traffic to sites from search engines and analyzing the impact that traffic has on the bottom line of companies. Wil’s career began at a search marketing agency in 1999, where he spearheaded the SEO strategies for companies that included Barnes & Noble, Harman Kardon, and Mercedes Benz USA. Today he is the founder of SEER Interactive, a web marketing firm founded in 2002. Follow him on Twitter @wilreynolds to continue the conversation.
1. Freshness of data (delay between link being detected and indexed )
Majestic – 7/10
Moz – 5/10
With Bings Webmaster Tools in the fray, we are getting backlink data quicker than ever. Bing is even faster than Google in some instances. One of our clients got a link from TechCrunch – Bing had it in 24 hours, Google’s webmaster tools (I am not saying Google Crawled it later just that they reported it later in webmaster tools) had it in like 3 days. I think Freshness for your own backlinks may be owned by the search engines, but for competitors, Majestic is the winner, with Moz improving every day.
2. Predictability of updates (conformance to scheduled times)
Majestic – 7/10
Moz – 4/10
SEOMoz have been unpredictable recently, in that their target dates are missed, and usually explained with a later blog post. Theyre pretty transparent on this (and lets be fair, have been striving to achieve some pretty lofty goals given the age and experience of the startup). We were expecting an update on the 29th of June, but this appears to have been pushed back.
3. API performance (uptime and speed of response)
Majestic – 8/10
Moz – 7/10
Uptime is fine for both. I think when there are issues Majestic gets back to you slower than Moz from a customer service standpoint. Moz times out more frequently than Majestic when we try to pull data in across URLs in different Google Docs tools
4. Percent of links reported by Google Webmaster Tools that Majestic/Moz know about from a variety of sites
Given the types of links we build, we have never had a strong need to compare the two, but just you asking this question has me rethinking things, thanks Eric. I’ve compared Moz against Majestic, but especially with Bing’s new kick-ass webmaster tools, maybe I should be. 🙂
I haven’t done a head to head comparison in some time, but when I compared Moz to Majestic for which one was picking up links from the SEER site out to Distilled for some research I was doing Majestic had found about 90%, Moz found about 50%. That was when I started really using both more and more.
5. Percent of links reported by Moz & Majestic that still exist
SEOmoz 7/10
Majestic: 5/10
For the most part, I rarely have to look at this, as we don’t have a lot of links that go up and down. I will say that Moz’s links are much more often than not actually up and serve many fewer false positives.
6. Correlation of key metrics (e.g. PA/DA and ACRank) with SERPs
SEOmoz 8/10
Majestic: 2/10
Without a doubt, this is where Moz shines (and user experience of the tool). AC rank is, for the most part, not something I would recommend any SEO to use. For the interviewees, we all know that but I think it should be taken out altogether if possible just because for newbies/intermediates it could be extremely misleading.
