Review: Open Site Explorer: SEOMoz’s New Platform for Accessing Link Data

For all the search engine marketers out there, there’s a new link analysis tool on the block. It’s called Open Site Explorer, from SEOMoz, and it’s made quite a splash around the web, especially with the future of Yahoo Site Explorer hanging in the balance thanks to the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal.

Here’s a quick overview of Open Site Explorer. The tool uses SEOMoz’s API to access their Linkscape web indexing tool, a much more in-depth tool that can provide a much more zoomed-in picture of links on the web. Linkscape works similar to other crawlers, as it starts from a core of trusted sites and crawls ever outward to discover each link. Open Site Explorer includes some interesting data from Linkscape on the main page.

As soon as you enter an URL, OSE will show you the page and domain authority of the URL, along with the number of linking root domains and the total number of links. If you register at the site, which is free, you can view up to 1,000 links and their anchors side by side. (A subscription to SEOMoz’s pro service gets you up to 10,000 links.) OSE includes filtering capabilities that enable you to view only 301 links and exclude non-visited links. You can also sort the list by link location, (external to the site or internal,) and see only links that point to a particular group of pages, subdomain or root domain.

The second tab shows you root domains that contain links to your target domain. This allows you to get a quick picture of the types of sites that are linking to yours. Next, you’ll find pie charts that break down links between internal and external sources and those that are frequently followed versus those that aren’t.

You also get access to the anchor text distribution, with sorting options including domains that contain a link with a given term and the number of links contained in each anchor. The Full Metrics tab gives users of the pro version access to myriad other metrics obtainable through Linkscape.

Compared to Yahoo’s Site Explorer, OSE seems geared more toward SEO professionals, which makes sense, because it was created by SEOMoz, a company with a full portfolio of SEO tools. Some advantages OSE has over Yahoo Site Explorer are:

• Side-by-Side Comparison: Click the Add URL button on OSE’s main page and enter a URL that will appear next to the URL you’re examining.
• Link Filtering: OSE allows you to filter external versus internal links, as well as visited versus nonvisited.
• Visual Tracking: OSE offers pie charts that can show users at a glance how the number of external links compares to those that are internal, among other metrics.

The only area in which OSE lags behind is in CSV exporting of links. Yahoo will give you the first thousand, while the free edition of OSE limits you to a paltry 50.

There seems little doubt that SEOMoz timed its entry into the backlink and link popularity analysis market to capitalize on the widely expected mothballing of Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Nevertheless, OSE’s style and visual tools combined with its filtering and analysis options make it a winner.

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