Review: Open Site Explorer

SEOmoz announced the launch of a new tool today called Open Site Explorer. It’s their new backlink analysis tool powered by the linkscape index. Lets take a look..

First look, the tool is very pretty, as are all the moz tools. I always enjoy well designed interfaces. OSE offers four measurements on any domain you analyze including: Page Authority, Domain Authority, Number of Linking Root Domains, and Total Links.

OSE features four different tab views for sorting and displaying your backlink data. They include: linking pages, linking domains, anchor text distribution, and full link metrics.

Linking Pages

The linking pages display is what you expect and receive from most other link analysis tools, offering a list display of links to your site from all pages. In addition to other breakdowns that I have seen from backlink analysis tools, OSE give you the ability to display nofollowed, followed, or 301′d links individually to and from external and/or internal pages to any specific page, or pages on the root or subdomain.

This added functionality is something I have been longing for in a link analysis tool for some time, so it is definitely appreciated.

Using my personal blog as a gauge for reporting accuracy, I see that reported links seem to be pretty accurate. When viewing all (followed, nofollowed, 301) links, it OSE gives a nice breakdown of which links are which by notating nofollow links in red, and 301’s in green.

I did notice some minor discrepancy with link reporting at this level as OSE reports a followed link to my blog from Rae Hoffman’s post on ASE, but the only link to me from this page as you can see is a comment link, and clearly nofollowed.

Linking Domains

The linking domains display shows a clear breakdown of all domains linking to your site with their correlating rated domain authority and number of linking root domains. I see this as potentially a great tool for evaluating the value of link prospects.

Anchor Text Distribution

The anchor text distribution layout displays linking anchor text used to link to your page or domain and number of occurrences both from individual links and linking domains. This is similar to the anchor text tool I have used many times from Majestic SEO. I am a bit disappointed that OSE doesn’t offer the ability to view links by anchor text with the same follow, nofollow, 301 lens as on the linking pages display. This is a feature that should definitely be added.

Full Metrics

Last is the full metrics display, which gives a nice overview with additional SEOmoz metrics from the SEOmoz toolset and two graphs that display number of followed vs. nofollowed links and internal vs. external links.

Overall Open Site Explorer is a great tool for backlink analysis, and we’re only looking forward to improvements in the future. Existing SEOmoz Pro members will be pleasantly surprised with the addition of the new tool, and people considering upgrading to pro, well this may just tip the scale.

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