If you are looking for the definition of a technical term you may be better looking in our glossary of terms, If you see an obvious question which is missing, please let us know.
Majestic is a trading name of Majestic-12 Ltd. Majestic.com hosts a web-scale link map. The link map shows how all the web links together, giving users details of the information instructure of the web.
More detail about Majestic can be found on the "about-us" page.
Click the Sign Up for FREE button at the top of the page.
You can change your password at any time, just go to the 'My Details' section of your Majestic account
Our 'Historic Index' and 'Fresh Index' are huge databases which contain information about how sites on the Internet link together - effectively large repositories of Internet mapping data. Our tools then access these databases in order to generate reports which help people understand the flow of organic traffic to their own websites, and those of their competitors.
Our Historic Index is one of the most comprehensive sources of backlink data on the Internet. As such, despite our huge processing power, the index takes many days to build - ensuring that it is always a few days behind what is happening now. In order to address this, we have created a smaller, separate index which we call the 'Fresh Index'. As this index is smaller, we can update it more often, and thus it can be kept more up-to-date.
The two datasets - the 'Fresh Index' and the 'Historic Index' are separate, and it would take substantial effort to merge the two datasets seamlessly. As the two indexes are built separately from the same web crawl, older backlinks in the Fresh Index are often also present in the Historical Index.
If you are looking to extract backlink data from both Fresh and Historic, Majestic offer Index Merger. Index Merger creates a single extract produced by merging data from both the Fresh and Historic indexes.
The Historic index has 21,743,308,221,308 URLs from 4,502,566,935,407 crawled pages.
The Fresh index has 779,859,860,657 URLs from 330,836,149,492 crawled pages.
We report on our own copy of the world wide web ( our “link map” ). By focusing on a small amount of data from each page crawled ( links, page titles etc ) we can store huge amounts of data on commodity hardware.
In common with many web indexes, Our link map is ( and has been ) derived from two types of data source – data we crawl ourself and data imports from third parties, such as ( but not limited to ) Wikipedia ( https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ ) – this enables us to focus our crawl resources responsibly
We regularly update both of our indexes. However, due to the massive scale of the Historic Index it takes several days of constant processing to generate it. At the time of writing, we are able to update our Historic Index once every month, and aim to update the Fresh Index daily.
You can check the index build date and other index statistics in the footer.
Our Fresh Index and Historic Index are populated by crawl data produced by our web crawlers.
A web crawler cannot tell when a link was made, it only knows when it found it. Our Historic Index has the advantage of a history of data from when we started to crawl in 2006.
If a link has not been crawled for some time, then it may drop out of the Fresh Index. Should the same link be re-crawled after it is fallen out of scope, it may be falsely reported as new. Use of the Index Merger report can help reduce the impact of this form of data anomaly.
Understanding SEO keywords is important in content design, paid online advertising and competitive positioning. Spotting opportunities of how your product can serve people asking questions like “best gift for boyfriend”, or “fix leaking tap” can go beyond tuning your site for SEO and impact your wider marketing strategy.
There are a variety of online tools, like answerthepublic.com and keywordsheeter.com that can provide questions people ask search engines – or to provide similar words or phrases to help you design content with an edge.
Majestic offers a number of complementary tools for keyword research based on the Majestic web map. Keyword Checker provides statistics on the popularity of SEO terms in URLs, title and anchor text – giving you a measure of how popular your target phrases could be on the web. Keyword Generator reports on words and phrases found around links to you and your competitor sites – focusing that insight on your immediate targets. The Majestic keyword Search Explorer gives you a search engine independent view of the competitive landscape for a given key phrase across the world wide web.
You can read more about the Majestic approach to keyword research with Sante Achille's guide to keyword generator.
The percentages in the Anchor Text pie chart on Site Explorer summary screen are calculated the following way:
Whilst we hope to provide the best possible user experience to our userbase, this FAQ may contain errors and omissions. This page is intended to provide an overview of some of the techniques which may be used in the delivery of data from Majestic - but please note that the provision of any service may be subject to more frequent review than this text. Use of our services is subject to the acceptance of our Terms and Conditions.
Could we improve this page for you? Please tell us