On the subject of live links:
Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2025 8:42 am
What is the probability that a randomly selected domain in Google SERPs has the same index status as ours vs. competitors?
Chose not to pursue due to internal API requirements at the start of the project, looking to add soon.
How closely does our index compare to Google's ratio of pages per domain vs. our competitors'?
Chose not to track due to internal bahrain number data requirements. Looking to add soon.
How well does our URL metric correlate with US Google rankings vs our competitors?
Chose not to track due to known fluctuations in DA/PA as we radically change the link graph. The metric will be meaningless until the index stabilizes.
Ultimately, I wasn't able to achieve everything I wanted, but I was left with 9 solid, well-defined metrics.
Warnings
Don't read any further before reading this section. If you ask a question in the comments that indicates you haven't read the Caveats section, I'll just say "Read the Caveats section." So here goes...
This is a comparison of data returned by APIs, not within the tools themselves. Many competitors offer live, fresh, historical, etc. types of indexes that can differ in important ways. This is just a comparison of API data using default settings.
We set API flags to remove any and all known deleted links from Moz metrics but not competitors. This can actually bias the results in favor of competitors, but we thought it would be the most honest way to represent our data set against more conservative data sets like Ahrefs Live.
Some metrics are hard to gauge, especially like "is a link in the index," because there's no API call - not even Moz's - that tells you whether they've seen the link before. We do our best, but any errors here are on the API provider. I think we (Moz, Majestic, and Ahrefs) should all consider adding such an endpoint.
Chose not to pursue due to internal API requirements at the start of the project, looking to add soon.
How closely does our index compare to Google's ratio of pages per domain vs. our competitors'?
Chose not to track due to internal bahrain number data requirements. Looking to add soon.
How well does our URL metric correlate with US Google rankings vs our competitors?
Chose not to track due to known fluctuations in DA/PA as we radically change the link graph. The metric will be meaningless until the index stabilizes.
Ultimately, I wasn't able to achieve everything I wanted, but I was left with 9 solid, well-defined metrics.
Warnings
Don't read any further before reading this section. If you ask a question in the comments that indicates you haven't read the Caveats section, I'll just say "Read the Caveats section." So here goes...
This is a comparison of data returned by APIs, not within the tools themselves. Many competitors offer live, fresh, historical, etc. types of indexes that can differ in important ways. This is just a comparison of API data using default settings.
We set API flags to remove any and all known deleted links from Moz metrics but not competitors. This can actually bias the results in favor of competitors, but we thought it would be the most honest way to represent our data set against more conservative data sets like Ahrefs Live.
Some metrics are hard to gauge, especially like "is a link in the index," because there's no API call - not even Moz's - that tells you whether they've seen the link before. We do our best, but any errors here are on the API provider. I think we (Moz, Majestic, and Ahrefs) should all consider adding such an endpoint.