HUGE UPDATE! I ran 1 million domains through Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz, Majestic & SEO Spyglass to find out who really is the best backlink checker.
Back in 2013, I conducted an experiment to see which is the best link checker.
Long story short, Ahrefs won…
This really upset the Majestic team at the time and sparked a lot of controversy, but they did make some valid points-
And they were right!
So then re-conducted the experiment on an altogether BIGGER scale (1 million domains vs. the original 3). Ahrefs won again.
Now it’s many years later.
So I thought it would make sense to re-run the numbers this year for all 1 million domains AND compare the functionality of the tools.
But…
I’m also going to reveal how Majestic essential cheat on backlink counts (you won’t believe this one!)
What Will I Learn?
Before we get to the experiment, let me talk about my data source.
For those that don’t know, the Majestic team publish what is called the Majestic Million.
The Majestic Million is a list of the top 1 million website in the world, based on the number of referring IP’s found for that domain in their Fresh index.
So with this, Majestic SEO are outright telling us these are the sites they know the most about in terms of backlinks.
You can download a copy for yourself free of charge and it will tell you the total number of linking subnets (RefSubNets) and the total number of linking IPs (RefIPs) for each domain in the top million.
To compare Majestic SEO with Ahrefs, I’m going to look up the total number of linking subnets and IP’s for all of the domains in the Majestic Million.
To give you an example with this blog-
So in that specific instance, Majestic wins the test.
But:
Now imagine doing the same – but for 1 million sites.
That is the test I have done based on what Majestic say are the top 1 million sites in the world in terms of links.
This is what the CSV data looks like in its raw form-
And you can download a copy of the data that is used in this test.
Before I get to the results, I need to mention that both Majestic and Ahrefs maintain multiple indexes.
Majestic have two indexes: Fresh and Historic indexes.
Ahrefs have three: Live, Recent, and Historical.
You can learn more about these indexes here.
But for the sake of this article, I’ll be comparing the following indexes:
Let’s start with a comparison of the Fresh vs. Recent index.
With such a huge amount of data, I decided to split the results into 10 groups of 100,000 URLs (by Majestic GlobalRank) and then compare those groups.
This is what the group numbers look like (refer to by_groups.csv in the data pack)–
| GlobalRank | Ahrefs Wins (IP) | Majestic Wins (IP) | Ahrefs Wins (Subnet) | Majestic Wins (Subnet) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1-100,000 | 85,228 | 14,762 | 86,095 | 13,896 |
| 100,001-200,000 | 69,953 | 30,029 | 72,114 | 27,860 |
| 200,001-300,000 | 74,074 | 25,902 | 77,035 | 22,928 |
| 300,001-400,000 | 78,264 | 21,709 | 82,075 | 17,904 |
| 400,001-500,000 | 74,708 | 25,264 | 79,389 | 20,582 |
| 500,001-600,000 | 66,252 | 33,710 | 71,124 | 28,846 |
| 600,001-700,000 | 75,530 | 24,427 | 81,426 | 18,512 |
| 700,001-800,000 | 76,733 | 23,221 | 81,346 | 18,583 |
| 800,001-900,000 | 79,243 | 20,705 | 85,624 | 14,279 |
| 900,001-1,000,000 | 79,261 | 20,687 | 85,696 | 14,187 |
Just looks like a bunch of meaningless numbers right?
What about now-
Pretty brutal to look at if you are a current Majestic SEO customer right?
Now might be the right time to switch to Ahrefs.
But before you do let’s look at the totals-
It’s worth noting that Ahrefs has actually pulled even further ahead of Majestic (by ~7% for IP wins, and ~11% for subnet wins) since 2013. Which is when I first ran this experiment.
So those are the results of the Majestic Fresh vs. Ahrefs Recent index comparison, but what about Majestic’s Historic vs. Ahrefs’ Historical?
This test is particulary interesting because-
Well:
It presents an altogether different story.
| GlobalRank | Ahrefs Wins (IP) | Majestic Wins (IP) | Ahrefs Wins (Subnet) | Majestic Wins (Subnet) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1-100,000 | 15,424 | 84,555 | 14,789 | 85,187 |
| 100,001-200,000 | 20,320 | 79,606 | 19,873 | 80,047 |
| 200,001-300,000 | 18,081 | 81,855 | 17,613 | 82,309 |
| 300,001-400,000 | 13,645 | 86,317 | 13,177 | 86,770 |
| 400,001-500,000 | 11,990 | 87,976 | 11,675 | 88,275 |
| 500,001-600,000 | 9,186 | 90,778 | 8,973 | 90,976 |
| 600,001-700,000 | 11,219 | 88,674 | 11,003 | 88,870 |
| 700,001-800,000 | 11,167 | 88,627 | 9,120 | 90,819 |
| 800,001-900,000 | 10,515 | 89,433 | 9,857 | 90,036 |
| 900,001-1,000,000 | 10,796 | 89,139 | 10,346 | 89,580 |
I think the results become super clear when displayed in graph format:
Based on this data, Majestic absolutely crush Ahrefs when it comes to the historical index test.
This is even more apparent if we look at the totals-
So, Majestic clearly wins the historic index comparison.
But what does this really mean?
Well, historic indexes serve as records of the backlinks that have existed in their respective tools index at some point in the past, but aren’t live today.
When you take this into account, it comes as no surprise that Majestic won this test.
They’ve been saving (probably) links to their Historic index since they launched in 2009.
Ahrefs, on the other hand, has only been saving dead links to their Historical index since 2015, so Majestic has a 6 year head start here!
Bottomline: Majestic has a larger index of dead links than Ahrefs.
That’s all I’m going to say about that one.
I’ll let you decide which index is more important to you.
My methodology for this experiment is far from perfect.
So I thought I’d briefly explain what I see as some potential flaws with this data.
The graphs above show the number of “wins” rather than absolute numbers.
Because of this, the difference between the bars on the graphs is not really indicative of index size.
I’ll try to illustrate what I mean with an example:
Let’s say we have two sites:
(Yes, it’s an extreme example, but bare with me!)
Ahrefs “wins” for both of these sites, but it’s clear that there’s a much larger difference between reported numbers from each tool for Site B.
With Site A, Ahrefs only wins because they report one extra Ref.IP.
This means that the “number of wins” doesn’t give any insight into how much bigger one database is than the other.
So what does “number of wins” tell us?
It tells us that Ahrefs finds more links for any given website than Majestic, and that it’s rare for Majestic to show links than Ahrefs (links = IPs/Subnets).
FYI, if you’re wondering why I chose to compare IPs/Subnets over links, check out this article co-authored by Dixon Jones from Majestic.
It’s important to remember that we’re dealing with two totally different indexes here.
Which means that some links that Majestic reports may not exist in Ahrefs’ Index, and vice-versa.
Once again, let me offer an example.
This time we only need one hypothetical site, for which we’ll assume that both Ahrefs and Majestic report the same number of links: 3.
Here are the three hypothetical links reported by each tool:
| Ahrefs | Majestic |
|---|---|
| domain.com/webpage | domain.com/webpage |
| domain.com/webpage2 | domain.com/webpage2 |
| anotherdomain.com/webpage | someotherdomain.com/blog |
Do you see my point?
Just because we have the same number of reported links from each tool doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the same links.
You can see in our hypothetical example that only two of the links are common to both indexes.
This brings me on to an important point:
If you desperately need a full picture of your link profile, you’ll have to pay for both tools and cross-reference data.
BUT!
And this is a BIG BUT!
Even if you do that you need to understand that Majestic’s backlink stats are almost always inflated.
Why?
Because of the absolutely absurd way Majestic count and report backlinks.
I am going to talk about that more in the next section, but seriously – make sure you are sitting down for this one because I am going to show you how Majestic essentially cheats on backlink counts.
Now we’ve talked about backlink data and whatnot, I want to make an important point:
Majestic and Ahrefs are VERY different tools.
Majestic is essentially one tool: a backlink checker.
But Ahrefs is a suite of tools. Alongside Site Explorer (for checking backlink data), they also have:
Another big differentiator is the addition of “Competitive intelligence” in Ahrefs, which is basically search traffic data.
In other words, you can see how much traffic any domain or website receives from Google, and the keywords it ranks for.
See my full Ahrefs review and my Ahrefsbot blog post.
But let’s get back to backlink data for a moment…
It’s important to realise that index size means nothing unless you’re able to extract actionable data and insights from it.
Both Majestic and Ahrefs do have an API for doing this at scale (this is what I used for this study), but most of us don’t pay for access to that.
So, let’s quickly compare the on-site backlink research features that exist in Ahrefs and Majestic.
Let’s start by plugging this same URL (the beginners guide to SEO from Moz) into both tools to see what kind of insights we can get from them.
NOTE. I’m using the “exact URL” setting, because I only want to analyze backlinks pointing directly at that URL.
A few comparable metrics right off the bat:
So Majestic reports more backlinks in total, but Ahrefs reports (a lot) more referring domains.
That’s a win for Majestic, right?
Not so fast.
(This is something I really feel the need to highlight!)
Majestic’s backlink stats are almost always inflated because of the absolutely absurd way they report backlinks.
Let me illustrate by going to the Referring Domains tab in Majestic.
Majestic is reporting 370K+ backlinks from just one referring domain.
That accounts for nearly 60% of all reported backlinks!
Let’s see how many backlinks Ahrefs reports from this domain-
Just 4!
So why does Majestic report 373,004 backlinks from that domain while Ahrefs only reports 4?
This happens because Majestic fail to strip URL parameters from URLs, which results in the same backlink being duplicated hundreds, sometimes even thousands of times.
This also happens when you export the data from Majestic.
Take a look at this backlink export from my blog and you’ll see that digitalphillipines.net is linking to me nearly 700,000 times-
But when we export the data and look at the links, you’ll see they are mostly duplicate links with different UTM parameters on the end-
For example Majestic counts the below as 4 separate backlinks-
But the reality is they are just one backlink – but Majestic is reporting them as 4.
In my opinion, this is total madness.
Especially when the vast majority of the 700,000 links coming from digitalphillipines.net are duplicates.
Ahref’s on the other hand, only counts 17 links-
Why?
Because Ahrefs understands that those additional URL parameters do not make them all unique links so filter them out accordingly.
If you go from the Summary page in Majestic to their Ref.Domains and Backlinks reports, you’ll notice that the total numbers of ref.domains and backlinks that you just saw on that “Summary” page now completely disappear.
That’s because these reports are limited to 30k rows of data – 600 pages, 50 results per page.
This makes every report in Majestic somewhat useless because you can only see a sample of the data!
Sure you can view the first 30,000 rows – but after that, they cut you off.
That is a huge limitation and I feel like it really goes against the grain of Majestic’s core mission.
What’s the point of building a huge database of links if you are going to limit access to it?
It’s the same when you try to export this data too – it defaults to a max of 30K rows.
However you can export more than 30k rows if you request an “advanced report” by clicking the tiny link highlighted in the screenshot below:
But even when you click this, you’re taken to quite a puzzling page where you seemingly have to tick a bunch of boxes in order to do what you want to do.
So bottomline-
In comparison, Ahrefs shows full data in both their Ref.Domains and Backlinks reports.
And exporting FULL DATA is super easy – just hit the “export” button.
Much nicer!
However, one downside of this is that reports sometimes load slower in Ahrefs than Majestic, especially when analysing big sites.
This is because Ahrefs has to work to pull all data, whereas Majestic just has to show a cached sample of 30K pages/ref.domains.
To be honest:
Any further comparison here makes no sense because Majestic’s on-site tools only works with a sample of data whereas Ahrefs lets you work with FULL data.
However, I do want to compare and highlight a few things in these reports.
But first, I want to talk a bit about indexes.
So you may have noticed that Majestic has two different indexes for you to choose from, while Ahrefs has three.
You may have noticed in the screenshots above that Majestic defaults to their Fresh index, whereas Ahrefs defaults to their Live index.
Let me try to explain the deal with all of these indexes.
So Ahrefs Live index is updated every 15 minutes, and I know they put a lot of effort into re-crawling all links in their Live index pretty regularly.
But as Ahrefs recrawls links, they naturally come across some that are no longer there.
Like, sometimes the page will still be live, but the link will be gone. Or maybe the actual linking page can no longer be found.
In this case, Ahrefs removes the link from their Live index, but it remains in their Recent index, where this backlink stays for 90 more days. Quite often the pages disappear because of server downtime, so when Ahrefs next re-crawls the page, they may see that the link is still there.
If this happens, it gets moved back to the Live index.
If Ahrefs don’t see the link going live again within 90 days of it being moved to the Recent Index, it gets moved to the Historical index. This is basically a graveyard for all backlinks that they’ve once seen as live, but the subsequent recrawls confirmed their death.
To summarise (for Ahrefs):
Unlike Ahrefs, they don’t maintain a Live index. They only have their Fresh index, which is kind of the same as Ahrefs’ Recent index as it contains all links that were seen live in the last 90 days, regardless of their status at the present moment.
They also have their Historic Index, which is comparable to Ahrefs Historical index. However, it is vastly bigger than Ahrefs’ Historic index because they started saving deleted links years before Ahrefs did.
To summarise (for Majestic):
Having used both tools on and off for a good few years, I know that Ahrefs only started adding links to their Historic index around mid-2015, whereas I’d say Majestic has been doing that for at least 5 years.
That’s exactly why Majestic’s is bigger right now.
Either way, these tools historic indexes are essentially graveyard of links, so most of the links in both Majestic and Ahrefs Historic indexes are no longer live.
But anyway, now we’ve tackled the technicalities, I can move on to some features.
Before I do that, I want to stress something:
I much prefer Ahrefs over Majestic.
So most of the stuff I discuss below will be reasons why that is the case.
But let’s start with a brief comparison of the summary/overview reports in Ahrefs and Majestic.
To start, I’ll highlight a couple of super useful graphs that I absolutely love on the Overview tab in Ahrefs Site Explorer: Referring Domains and Organic Traffic.
These show how the number of referring domains and amount of organic traffic has changed to a site (or URL) over time.
Here’s the referring domains graph:
Here’s the organic search traffic one:
Unfortunately, Majestic have no such graph for backlink data, and they don’t have any data on search traffic at all.
They do show you two graphs that they call “URL backlink history” and “Referring domains” – but these are entirely different.
In Majestic’s own words, these charts show “the number of Referring Domains [or backlinks] reviewed every day.”
So this graph mostly refers to how fast Majestic crawls the web, rather than showing how fast your target acquired backlinks.
As a result, these graphs don’t tell you anything about how a target’s backlink profile has changed over time, so I don’t really understand why they’re useful.
If anyone does happen to have a good use case, feel free to let me know in the comments!
And it’s also an image, it’s not an interactive graph. So I can’t hover my mouse over a specific date and get the precise number, like I can in Ahrefs.
As for the other numbers that you can see in Ahrefs “Overview” report and in Majestic “Summary” report, they’re more or less comparable.
Pretty standard stuff, no striking differences there.
I’d say the only major difference is the fact that each tool shows their proprietary metrics.
In Majestic’s case, these are TF/CF.
And in Ahrefs these are UR/DR.
Comparing them is a different story, so I’m not even going to attempt that but I do use both sets of metrics to evaluate expired domains/aged doamins.
Let’s move on to the referring domains reports.
Majestic has quite a few data points in their Ref.domains report, so they had to introduce a few different views.
Here’s the one they default to: Links.
For me, the most useful data points here are:
I think it’s really cool how they include the number of ref.domains and backlinks to each ref.domain – that’s something Ahrefs doesn’t do.
I also like their Geo report.
This shows things like the domain language(s), TLD, IP, IP location (cool!), TF/CF.
In fact, a lot of these reports are quite cool – I recommend playing around with them.
But what about filtering and sorting options?
Unfortunately, these don’t really exist (I guess their different reports kind of count of filters?) but they do have “Order by” and “Then” sorting options, which are quite confusing.
I think the biggest letdown here is that many of these reports end up being kind of pointless, simply due to the fact that Majestic only lets you work with sample data.
Sure, you have 30K rows to play with, which admittedly is plenty for most sites. But for some sites it just doesn’t cut it.
Here’s another thing:
Although Majestic have a column with a number showing the number backlinks, they don’t differentiate between dofollow and nofollow links.
This means it’s only possible to sort by the number of backlinks from a ref.domain – you can’t sort by the referring domains with the most dofollow backlinks, for example.
Ahrefs, on the other hand, absolutely shines when it comes to filtering and sorting.
For a start, there’s a column highlighting dofollow/nofollow links, and it’s easy to sort a list of referring domains by that metric.
And once again, Ahrefs will sort the entire list of ref.domains – not just a sample of the data like in Majestic.
Here’s another notable feature Ahrefs has in this report:
You can easily filter referring domains by the backlink type, and can instantly see how many referring domains of each type there is.
So if you want to export dofollow ref.domains only, simply filter and click export. Easy as that.
Back to Majestic, it looks like the domain with the most backlinks to this Moz guide is ryangum.com.
It has almost 378K backlinks. Let’s click on that number and see what they are.
Aaaannnndddd… I see only 10.
Useless.
It’s a completely different story in Ahrefs, as they show everything – it’s even downloadable.
And again, I’ll reiterate the point I touched on earlier – some of the backlink numbers are absolutely crazy in Majestic thanks to the duplicated backlinks with URL parameters.
Case in point:
(I guess Majestic doesn’t care about URL parameters?)
But anyway… let’s move on.
Let’s start with Majestic.
In the Ref.domains report, there was at least some sorting options – here there are none.
All they give you is option to show/hide deleted links and display 1/3/10/all backlinks per domain.
I can see how one backlink per domain is useful, but three and ten… c’mon!
It almost feels like someone was desperate to come up with some kind of useful functionality here, but failed miserably.
Regardless, none of these restrictions matter anyway because this report (like the rest) only shows a sample of 30k rows out of almost 100k. That means Majestic are hiding 70% of the links they know about from you.
Luckily, things are more logical in Ahrefs.
First things first, their Backlinks report doesn’t show sampled data – it’s full data.
You can also choose to show either Similar links, One link per domain, or All links.
This report defaults to Group similar links. This makes sense, as it groups sitewide and duplicated links, but still shows unique links from unique pages of the same domain. Which is pretty cool.
Is this report perfect? No. I’ve seen a few bugs here and there, but the usability and convenience of this filter still beats Majestic’s useless “3/10 links per domain” filter by a wide margin.
You probably already spotted those other filters too – Link type, Platform, and Language.
I recommend playing around with these – they’re really cool!
There are also some sorting options, including:
Combining sorting AND filtering is when you really start to do some cool stuff.
For example, you could filter by dofollow links only, from English sites only, and then sort by DR.
Seriously, play around this this report – you can do TONS.
Here’s one final report I want to briefly highlight (this one is specific to Ahrefs):
Ahrefs is MUCH MORE than just a backlink checking tool. They have world-class search traffic data too.
Yes, there are other tools have one of the two (e.g., Majestic with their backlink data) but Ahrefs does an amazing job of merging backlink and search traffic data together.
I don’t think there’s a better example of this than in their Top Pages report.
This shows the “top pages” on a domain by search traffic.
But this report is super cool because it also shows:
There’s also a keywords dropdown which unveils ALL the keywords each page is ranking for.
Majestic has nothing like this, so there’s nothing to compare here.
I mentioned earlier that Ahrefs is much more than a backlink checking tool.
It’s actually a suite of SEO tools.
Content Explorer is one tool I want to highlight here – this is a database of almost a billion web pages complete with backlinks and traffic data.
Basically, you enter a keyword and it’ll return any content containing (in either the title or body of the article, depending on your selection).
Here are the results for “SEO”:
The highlighted region shows some of the cool data that Content Explorer shows for each and every results – there’s Domain Rating, referring domains, and organic traffic.
I’m not aware of any other tool that can do this and honestly, it’s super-useful! And let’s not forget the “who tweeted” button which is useful for any content marketers out there.
But what about Majestic? Where does that shine?
Well there are some cool things that I like, such as their Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics.
If you’ve read my guide to finding expired domains, you’ll already know that I look at a ratio of these two metrics to find decent domains.
I’m also a fan of Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow metric, which is super useful for getting a sense of how relevant a backlink profile is.
However, I’ve found that this isn’t always particularly accurate.
You can see in the screenshot above that mythemeshop.com (a website selling premium Wordpress themes including my theme) falls into the ‘Health’ category when looking at Topical Trust Flow.
That doesn’t seem right to me.
So as you can see, the tool that’s most useful for you will depend on the kind of data that you’re trying to access.
I have to be honest though:
For me, Ahrefs is my go-to tool for almost everything these days. I’d say Majestic does maybe 10-20% of what Ahrefs does, and that’s being generous!
Irrespective of opinion, bias and discreditation – the data does not lie.
The data never lies, its why I love working with data so much. Want to settle which design is better? Test it.
Want to see which is the best backlink checker? Test it.
Data does not lie.
Ahrefs is clearly the winner here by a huge margin – a much larger margin than my initial test with just 3 domains highlighted.
In the Wins by IP test, Ahrefs finds 216% more than Majestic SEO. They are winning on ~76% of domains compared to Majestic SEO’s ~24%.
In the Wins by Subnets test, Ahrefs is also the clear winner finding 306% more links than Majestic SEO. They are winning on ~80% of domains compared to Majestic SEO’s ~20%.
So quite clearly, the best backlink checker is Ahrefs. PERIOD.
Even if the source data is Majestic SEO’s very own Majestic Million – Ahrefs still knows more about them than Majestic does.
Unless you only care about who has the biggest database of dead links of course.
And let’s not forget about all of the other awesome tools Ahrefs has – it is so much more than a backlink checker.
In an effort to be unbiased and transparent, I have 2 seperate ways for you to independently verify the data yourself.
All of the data used in this test is available to download here.
This is the easiest way to spot check the data.
You can manually spot check these at random!
What if you want to verify the data for all million domains though?
Well for that you will need a linux server with shell access, an Ahrefs API key and these files.
WARNING: Before you do this be aware that 1,000,000 API credits with Ahrefs costs $10,000.
For full transparency’s sake Ahrefs gave me an API key with 1,000,000 credits so I could run this test.
If any established bloggers want to confirm these results themselves and publish on their blog then please get in touch with me.
Anyway here is how to do it-
Remember folks regardless of all of the controversy the data does not lie.
The simple fact is Ahrefs knows 216% more about Majestic SEO’s Majestic Million than they do (compared to 57% when I first ran this test in April 2013)
And if you haven’t checked out Ahrefs for a while you might be surprised, because it has evolved from a simple backlink checker to a complete SEO tool.
You can sign up for an Ahrefs account here to check it out for yourself.
And, if you’re on a budget and want to get more information about free tools, check out the Ahrefs Webmaster Tools as well as my free seo tools list.
Next time you see this topic in a forum – feel free to use this post to instantly win the argument.
887 Responses
Subscribe to my YouTube
Join My Facebook Group
Connect on Linkedin
Free SEO Tutorials
SEO Case Studies
Links That Rank
A great analysis Matthew.After the head-to-head between Ahrefs and Majestic, how does OSE stack up now? OSE seemed to be reasonably good in the 3 site test.Thanks
Off the top of my head I have no idea 🙂
Great freaking post Matthew! I love that your stuff is so detailed with data, PDF’s and screenshots. This is how all blog posts should me done, with “meat and potatoes”! I have learned a ton from you in the past 3 months and your YouTube channel trainings are world class. Thanks bro!
No worrys, thanks for reading 🙂
Hey Matthew after reading response of Viktar Khamianok (Link-Assistant CEO) . He stated that why SEO SpyGlass show less backlinks than other in his post.Now if i ask you, Which one is better than SEO SpyGlass and Ahrefs? Which one you will suggest?
Ahrefs finds a lot more links. SEO Spyglass provides realtime data.Both together.
What a post boy !! enjoyed reading every words !! Wonder how you manage your time to do all these interesting posts 😀
That makes two of us lol
Lengthy, in-depth and insightful.I think, now I have to request you to write one more article as conclusion :)Regards
If you say so https://searchlogistics.com/seo/tools/backlink-checkers/
Dude I really love your research. Its so fantastic…..I enjoy reading it
Thanks Julian hope it helps you out!
Good stuff Matt and a poor show from Majestic! What is your opinion on opensite explorer and moz tools in comparison?
Please see https://searchlogistics.com/seo/tools/backlink-checkers/
The reaction to the next test should be more than interesting anyway ^^
Shame, being an arse as a public figure head has poor and far reaching effects when that arse is also a public figurehead that deals in business.Castrating people with speculation in a public forum to protect the pride of the company that is represented is shameful, pathetic and shows desperation and doubt in their own ability’s. Dixons actions show exactly what your findings reveal.
Incredible.Im left with a very sour taste in my mouth from the tact (or lack there of) that Majestic has had publicly.Matt you said they were nice peep when you spoke to them via email but I cant help but wonder if your not underplaying it for their benefit (or your own if your working an angle), but you know what? thats awesome, it shows that you are the real man with humility and tact ( Majestic take a Leaf from Matts book ;P ).Great going Matt! you are now my Anne Smarty and I look forward to being dropped kicked by you Sir!
Hi,Yeah they could have done better and it was mainly Dixon at fault who has a reputation for being an arse hole anyway.Well yeah Dixon only turned nice when he/majestic had something to lose. Dixon has a habit of shouting people down, I think thats the first time someone has took him to the cleaners for it though.I’ll be doing another test very soon, but this time with a fully qualified data scientist as majestic highlighted that as a weakness in this test.Eventually they’ll learn ^^
Hi,Can you elaborate on that a bit more please?
Thanks for the recommendation. May I know which one has fastest index links updates?
Hey Matt,Thanks for keeping on top of this and for the thorough analysis. Will be making the switch from Majestic to Ahrefs.Do you have any tips or guides on how to make the most out of their platform?Best,Jake
HI Jake,Well I only use it for extacting competitor backlinks – they have a nice bulk feature to do lots of URL’s at once ^^Thats about it lol
I used to subscribed to OSE, but their servers bandwidth is extremely slow when using from Singapore, before they start charging they should improve their bandwidth first. Now trying both ahrefs and majestic but still dont know who is better, long run might go for one only.
Well I would certainly recommend Ahrefs 😛
Matt, just found this today. Long but excellent read. Thanks for going through all the data and analyzing the massive results.No, the data doesn’t lie. It will be interesting to see how Ahrefs and Majestic evolve as they update and innovate, (as well as the other services, as I’m sure they want to be competitive/relevant). But I doubt the results will change much that quickly. Thanks again, I’ll be watching for any follow-ups.Dave
Thanks :)I’ll have a follow up soon ^^
Been reading this post – albeit rather confusingly – is it relevant anymore ? I just got an email from link assistant today saying that spyglass now uses it’s own “massive link database” – that now has up to date 837 billion links , I know all these tools both have their pros and cons – but if a tool actually goes and builds it’s own link database – does that then mean whoever has the biggest database wins ?
Hi,Yes it is still relevant and I’ll be relaunching this test in the near future to measure the improvements of each service. Previously it wasn’t worth including spyglass in the bigger test due to their results here https://searchlogistics.com/seo/tools/backlink-checkers/
Hi,The Majestic team like cutting political angles to discredit so I have to ensure there is no wiggle room :)I agree with what you say, but I’m not fighting against logic, sense or reason with them.
Thank you. This post was incredibly helpful. I really like the photo at the top as your first presentation of yourself ROFL. 🙂 I also loved the Anne Smarty fanfair, she is cool. I sent you a private message on this too, but Jim Boykin is a wonderful human being. I have known him for close to a decade.You rock. Bold, time consuming to make, and super informative post! 🙂
Hi,Thanks for the feedback, i’ve had mixed responses about that picture :PGlad you enjoyed the post!
Well I think that you don’t need to be a qualified data scientist, as long as you know what you want to measure, how do it and you have a large data set. Seriously, I’ve had a couple of so called “qualified data scientists” contact me and ask to do a certain task for them and paid me on a freelance project collaboration. And this makes me wonder, once you hit the “top spot” in the scientific analysis, do you even bother to DIY or simply go for freelancers who basically know what they’re doing, but lack the “power of personal brand”. Now I know for sure that Matthew did this with his own two hands and demonstrated the gaps in Majestic Seo’s tool. And as I said, having such a huge data set is all you need to perform an analysis. Errors in estimations are pretty much taken out and all it remains is the true results. Which in this case proves that someone isn’t acknowledging their tool limitations. Just sayin’…
Well the complaint from Majestic last time was that I wasn’t a data scientist therefore the results aren’t relevant.This time i’m using a qualified data scientist.
I have learn several excellent stuff here. Certainly worth bookmarking for revisiting.I surprise how a lot effort you place to create any such wonderful informative site.
Thank you 🙂
Hi Matthew, this is a great experiments. I’am newbie but I happy to read this. Now I using opensite, each time I compare data with ahrefs, ahrefs always gives more large data than opensite.actually, I interest using ahrefs, but it seems give a limit request to use. while opensite give unlimited request.btw, thank you for share your experience
Well I’ve never come close to using the limit with ahrefs, and I use it a bunch ^^
Probably it makes sense for those who are on budget to choose just one tool, but those who are serious about backlinks will have Moz, MjSEO and ahrefs subscriptions anyways. They will de-dupe the lists and start working, without thinking who has the largest data set… m2c
True Story ^^
Hi, Matt. This basically verifies a lot of hypothesis: 1) There’s no such thing as a tool that can cover all the needs of SEOs (my two cents here) 2) Competition is good and it’s even better when someone with extensive research knowledge demonstrates why, when, who, where. 3) The lack of authority female presence in the online and SEO business. I’m a little confused about Ann’s remark, the one with numbers. I don’t have much experience, I’ve been doing all sorts of research (marketing, Psychology), handling large sets of data and numbers. What I can say is that numbers have feelings, too. (It’s something us mad Statisticians like to say to justify our love for numbers and why we prefer them in comparison to… people). She has been like an idol long before I entered the online zone and MyBlogGuest has been a valuable resource for the past 2 years. But numbers are important. Comparing data sets and results and generating insights can never be done my asking 1,000,000 people how they think about seo tools. It would take too much time and energy. Plus, Google’s very own algorithm works based on numbers. You can’t simply ignore a sample of 1,000,000 websites. You can’t, it’s not fair. Okay, so 3 might be just a “case study”, 100 might be let’s say close to the edge of generating a valid statement. 1,000,000 it’s already confirmation that results aren’t biased. I mean, the bigger the sample the easier it is to “control” type II errors in statistics. Heck, even 1,000 would be enough to control those errors that might lead to biased results. I will probably still use Majestic’s Site Explorer for a couple of clients and my little Romanian blog, but I’m starting to doubt all the statistics value I thought they could bring to a report. Never used Ahrefs, but there can be no better time to try it out. RavenTools are still at my heart, and after their new updates last week, it feels like it improved significantly. And another 2 hours spent here, but it feels like an earned time, not a wasted one. 😀
Hi,1) I agree 110%2) I’m going to redo this study shortly to measure who has made the most developments since this study.Glad you enjoyed the blog 🙂
wow! It was my exact sentiment Roxana when i talked about doing the mother of all tests (waaay back up at the start of the comments) called “aHrefs versus MajesticSEO: The Proper Real Test” and maybe use 10,000,000 domains! said with a hint of sarcasm! Matt – Look forward to your follow up study.
Thanks Matt for your fine work with this experiment. I’ve read up to update#3. Ahrefs seems to be the most thorough of the bunch, which backs up what I’ve been thinking from using the various tools. Although, I do agree that using multiple tools and combining results is the way to do SEO like a mozboss.By the way Matt, your article is one of the best examples I’ve seen lately of writing EPIC SHIT, well done 😉 My blog (Moneyeering) is nearing the official launch, it’s off to a cracking start and is developing at a very fast pace in less only a couple weeks of building, networking, researching and writing. This week’s goal for the blog is to create and publish at least one very well researched, insightful, in-depth ~1-2k word articles… Target is an EPIC article, even if it takes 8+ hours to produce. I’m also on the hunt for a few more guest writers, but our moto for this is definitely quality over quantity. After the first month and as content develops, next goal is polishing the design, increasing usability and onsite-optimisation, while building a few quality links from reputable sites.Feel free to check out the blog and drop me any words of wisdom or advice. I’d be oh soo grateful :)Anyway cheers Matt!- Mr. Moneyeer
Hi,Yeah Ahrefs has the most comprehensive database for now :)I would say just make your articles fun to read while educating! Although Dixon did help me out big time with this one so props to him for that.Good luck with your ventures!
Hi Mark,Hahaha feel free to spend all night on here :PI answered your questions in the email you sent I think 🙂
I have just watched your video; Blimey I’m sucked down a worm hole. Talk about good content marketing. I will be on this all night if I’m not careful 🙂 I had done a lot of research previously and spoke to a few SEO marketing agency owners in Manchester that sing Powersuite’s praises. Our old website http://www.ahoycreative.co.uk was hit really bad in spring 2012 and we never recovered our ranking. We were ranking really well for terms like ‘web design manchester’ and “design agencies’ and it drove a lot of enquires and business. We were always in the top 5 results. The lack of recovery or feedback for our website and clients websites was painful. I lost total confidence in my SEO supplier over time. I won’t mention any names as they are really nice lads but I just didn’t get the service we needed. They were expending very quickly and started to attract much bigger clients. Maybe I was too demanding. I wanted a first page result for one of the terms again. I was spending £600pm for around 7 months. I then spent a fortune on SEO and a fortune on PPC. I’m gutted.We bought a new domain name http://www.ahoy.co.uk and have launched phase 1 of our new website. Phase two will go live next month with lots of services and 100s of pages of blog content being pulled from our old website. We will start to optimise the onpage this week and then look at our strategy in terms of links. Our best bet is design inspiration sites and guest posting I would think as we have some really nice design work. So I’m setting myself the task of dong it myself. With a little help from writers I may add. I hear good things about http://www.copify.com and we have some partners in PR who we can lean on too. I have all sorts of good content ideas but not much time! If it works out well I will look to partner up with a search marketing team or build a small search marketing team within Ahoy.Which brings me to my biggest question – how the heck do you find the time to generate so much GOOD content?
Well it’s 2.14am and I’m tired but I have read the whole flippin saga. I couldn’t stop reading; the comments too. What a read. I was only wanting to validate SEO Powersuite as a successor to Market Samurai before I made the purchase and the I stumbled upon this! In summary I’m going for Powersuite as it seems like the best allrounder for a full service agency rather than an SEO only agency and more affordable too. Great post. I bet your to blame for many an eye bag 😉
Hahaha thanks very much =D I’m guessing you actually watched the SEO Powersuite video in the end as well but you should check out my updated SEO Powersuite review
Wow Matt what a great post, in Majestic HQ they´ll be on fire.I hope they get a fireman close.
Well they asked for it!
Hi Matthewjust wanted to share a new site explorer from SheerSEO:www.SheerExplorer.com
Thanks for the heads up
Just finished reading all the updates. Pretty amazing the amount of stir your initial comparison made and really enjoyed the all the info and comments. There is no doubt that competition is good for us end users and there is also no doubt that “data deflects bullets” :).
Hi,Yeah I didn’t expect it to be like that but Dixon was on hand to pour fuel on the fire with both hands which helped a whole bunch! Props to team Majestic for that!
Love how they shoot the messenger Matt! Keep up the awesomeness bro.
Data deflects bullets ^^
Matt you’ve ruined someone’s business, I hope you burn in hell!… Not!!As you stated, I hope Majestic SEO will make the most of this.From the initial attitude, it’s no surprise they’re second place.”Attitude is not the result of success; success is the result of great attitude”Only If they learn anything from link assistant & Ahrefs.
Hi Mike,From speaking to the big boss of Majestic I don’t think they are going to learn much.
Lengthy, in-depth and insightful. Couldn’t ask for anything more and perfect timing as performing cost analysis for vendors.Keep it up.
Cheers Marco!
Have to say, there was so much idle chat and Dixon-bashing in this article, I gave up after ~4-500 words.Would prefer a less soap-opera-style – straight down the middle analysis of the tools personally – but hey it isn’t my blog.ThanksColin
Hi Colin,The analysis is there – but there was background to the post 🙂
thanks for sharing views on 2 best utility for SEO as i have tried ahref i found it useful coz the link and domain details are very easily traced thats why its a lot useful for SEo campaign
Cheers Shane =D
This is easily one of the best SEO articles I’ve read in a long time. Kudos to you for coming up with such a test. I’d not heard of ahref until this time and am going to check them out.
Haha thanks Matt =D
I haven’t tested Majestic yet, but I currently use ahrefs and to be honest, there are a LOT of shitty links in there. One of my competitors top 10 links (shown as “strong” links in ahref) are all bullshit sites that have millions of links within their own network of 10 domains. All their linkpower comes from within and has no value in Googles eyes. So I don’t get why these links are counted as strong links.
How have you arrived at the conclusion that they have no value in Googles eyes?
Hi Leo,Well yes but what are your current challenges with doing that?
Hi Matt, we’re trying to best gain SEO ranks for our keywords =) But with the numerous software out there and the lack of reviews for CognitiveSEO, makes me wonder if we’re making the right investment, or should we switch?
Hi Matt,Am on CognitiveSEO, but am wondering if I should stay, or switch to Raventools / Ahrefs. Could you do a review on Cognitive or a comparison? Would appreciate any bit of advice =) Am running an online store and for now, we could only have 1 SEO program/month.
Hi,You should use which ever one helps best to support your business goals – what are you trying to achieve?
eheheh the truth everytime hurts 🙂 At the beginning I also used SEOmoz, Ahrefs and Majestic, now I have an Ahrefs account and I feel real good with it. More and better results, more quality, totally better interface for free and premium account.hey have u seen the majestic and SEOmoz interface? …NVM…Ahrefs is my tool, no way 🙂
The SEOMoz interface is quite cool but thats not just a link checker and does lots of other cool things
Oh my, what a read! I initially started out looking for advice on one of the above tools and ahem, spent a fair chunk of my time reading this and the post that went before it!I’ve run out of time as I really must do some work, but I’ll be popping back later as I haven’t had time to read all of the comments or see what the music was that I should have listed too!!!Matt, many thanks, most informative but even more entertaining!A new fan
Thanks for your kind words Jon, although I can’t take the credit for the entertaining side – Dixon Jones handed that to me on a plate ^^
I like this part in Majestic’s response, “that we do not feel that size alone provides a realistic comparison.” Sounds like what guys with small dicks like to hear. “It’s not the size. It’s how you use it.” LOL.Anyhow, one thing I would love to see addressed is the variety of links found between the two products. We can all clearly see that Ahrefs discovers far more links, but is Ahrefs finding all of the links Majestic finds and then some more or are they each finding a lot of different links?If there is a lot of variety between their two indexes, then it might be useful to use them both in conjunction together to get a more complete picture. If however, Ahrefs is finding 95+% of the links Majestic has found, then I see no reason to use Majestic for anything.Up until now, I have been using both, along with OSE, and importing all the link indexes into SpyGlass for a deeper analysis. I dropped Majestic, but would pick them back up if someone could prove that they are finding a significant number of links that Ahrefs is not.
Hi Mike,The ironic thing to that is in my first post I only used 3 domains. One of the big defensive points Majestic threw out there was the fact the sample size was so small and as such wasn’t a fair representation.Now they are saying that sample size is irrelevant?Basically the goal posts get moved as and when it is suitable for them to do so.What they haven’t learn is if the keep coming up with stupid reasoning like that, I’m just going to follow up with another test that eradicates that issue.For example their data scientist reference, the next test will be done with a credible insurance data modeller/analyst.Database overlap is worth looking at and so is the accuracy of the data returned.There isn’t a simple answer to the simple question of which is better = They both have strengths and weaknesses in their own right, but if your purely using them to find the raw amount of backlinks, ahrefs takes it for now.
Hey Matthew, the last update from Majestic is crystal clear PR bullshit.
Hi, I wonder if majesticseo did change anything, prices.. plans… bettered the services 😛
Not yet but they are working on it I believe 🙂
Good read. I’m just about to go and drop Majestic SEO and sign up to Ahrefs off the back of this.I’ll be interested to see what comeback Majestic can muster up in response to this!
I want to know how many other people did exactly what you said. I doubt Majestic will tell me how many they lost, but I’m sure Ahrefs will tell me how many they gained.
You mean like http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ ?
Hi Chris,Good point about cognitive SEO – you pay a little bit more but the coverage is much better!Wasnt aware that ahrefs was put on the market for sale – seems odd?
Wow… I might need to rethink where I’m dumping my money! Great post Matthew, +1.
Hi,Glad you enjoyed it 🙂