Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Moz Link Explorer

Moz Link Explorer
Formerly Open Site Explorer

Overview

What is Moz Link Explorer?

Link Explorer from Moz is a link building utility, replacing the former Open Site Explorer. Moz describes Link Explorer as a highly accurate link tool that lets users check the backlink profile and Domain Authority of any site. Moz was acquired…

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Open Site Explorer, used by The Search Guru's technical services and analytics reporting teams, is a valuable tool for examining the …
Continue reading

Solid SEO

8 out of 10
August 01, 2022
Incentivized
I use Moz Link Explorer to get a sense for what new sites are linking to my company's domain and track the success of our link building …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Popular Features

View all 14 features
  • Competitive analysis (8)
    9.0
    90%
  • Backlink management (7)
    9.0
    90%
  • Site audit / diagnostics (6)
    8.5
    85%
  • SERP ranking tracking (6)
    8.3
    83%
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

Moz Pro

$99

Cloud
per month

Moz Link Explorer

Free

Cloud

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Return to navigation

Features

SEO

Core features related to search engine optimization

8.1
Avg 7.8

SEO Channels

Features related to optimizing your website for specific channels

7.4
Avg 7.6

SEO Platform & Account Management

Features related to scalability and integration of the SEO platform

7.2
Avg 8.4
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is Moz Link Explorer?

Moz Link Explorer Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Link Explorer from Moz is a link building utility, replacing the former Open Site Explorer. Moz describes Link Explorer as a highly accurate link tool that lets users check the backlink profile and Domain Authority of any site. Moz was acquired by iContact in June, 2021.

Reviewers rate Backlink management and Competitive analysis and Integration with web analytics tools highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of Moz Link Explorer are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(34)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Open Site Explorer, used by The Search Guru's technical services and analytics reporting teams, is a valuable tool for examining the quality of clients' and competitors' link profiles. Users heavily rely on the Domain Authority metric to gauge a site's strength in search engines compared to others in the same industry. SEO professionals use Open Site Explorer to analyze backlinks, develop link building strategies, and gain valuable SEO insights such as an overview of sites linking to a website and Page or Site Authority numbers. The tool also helps users gain insight into their competition's inbound links and identify the types of links needed for their own websites. Moz Link Explorer is trusted by marketing teams to improve SEO performance, understand inbound link profiles, and track the success of their link building strategies while assessing new sites linking to their domains.

Helpful Link Comparison Feature: Many users have found the link comparison feature in the tool extremely helpful, allowing them to easily compare link metrics side by side among multiple sites, including both their own website and competitors' sites.

Convenient Filter Options: Reviewers appreciate the ability to filter links based on various criteria such as link equity, followed and redirected links from external sites and internal pages. This feature makes it convenient for users to analyze specific types of links and gather valuable insights.

Export to Excel Functionality: The export to Excel functionality has been praised by many users as a great addition. It allows them to examine the links in detail and easily sort them according to their preference, enhancing their ability to work with the data outside of the tool.

Slow Excel report generation: Some users have mentioned that generating Excel reports in the tool can be time-consuming. They state that it takes a while for the reports to generate, which can be frustrating when they need quick access to data.

Lack of instant data export: Several reviewers express their desire for an instant export feature to quickly access and download data without any delays.

Advanced reports require subscription: A number of users note that advanced reports, necessary for larger websites, are only available with a subscription to Moz Pro, which may incur additional costs. Users find this requirement inconvenient and would prefer if these features were included in the standard offering of the tool.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-9 of 9)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Moz Link Explorer is helping us to analyze the competitor, this tool help us to find the domain authority of the website and give us comprehensive data about the particular link, like how many in-bound link that particular URL is getting, what is the spam score of each link and other useful metrics that helps our team to do in-depth analysis. Moz Explorer is wonderful to use as it provide us complete analysis of off-page activity.
  • Provide an overview of website and webpage authority
  • Help us to find the backlinks opportunnity.
  • Help to analyze off-page SEO
  • Moz Link Explorer does not provide complete data as it has seen that as compare to Ahrefs or Semrush, Moz Link Explorer database is not huge and only provide few data.
This tool helping to find the spam score of inbound links of website that helps us our SEO team to decide the best website through which we can try to get backlinks. Moz also providing opportunity for backlinks so that we can acquire more link juice and rank on SERP.
August 01, 2022

Solid SEO

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Moz Link Explorer to get a sense for what new sites are linking to my company's domain and track the success of our link building strategy over time. When assessing strategy for link building looking at this information is very helpful. It can be used for the sites I manage or for partners and competitors.
  • Gives domain authority.
  • Displays new and lost links.
  • Gets info on what anchor text is being used.
  • Action items or contact info to help get more links.
  • Give updates automatically more than once a week.
  • Integrate traffic.
It is helpful if you are trying to understand where a site stands in terms of the links coming to it from different websites. It is less helpful in terms of providing specific actions or steps to take to get more links. However, it is a part of a larger Moz package so other areas provide information that can help there.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Link Explorer to find the links that are across my company as well as other competitors and use the information to get in contact with the links and increase the number of links and our domain rating.
  • A easy to understand domain authority.
  • A easy to understand link domains.
  • A easy to understand of links.
  • Provide a little more detail on the followed links.
  • provide a little more information with anchor text.
  • Helpful metrics overtime.
Anyone that wants to up their SEO game and better their website.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Moz Link Explorer is a great tool for assessing a website’s top pages in terms of inbound links, the website’s overall backlink profile, the number and quality of linking domains, the types of anchor texts used to link to the website, as well as similar links between the website and competitors' websites. It’s a good SEO tool.
  • Moz Link Explorer has a straightforward and easy to use interface. It’s very simple to navigate and understand the data.
  • The anchor text tool gives you an idea of the most widely used anchor texts other websites use when linking to your site. It can raise a red flag when too many sites are linking to you using exact match keyword anchor texts.
  • It would be helpful to incorporate an in-app messaging tool for removing spammy links. After the links are added to a tracking list, this messaging tool can be used to reach out to websites to remove spammy links. And all of the progress will be tracked within Link Explorer.
If you would like a high-level overview of how healthy your backlink profile is, Link Explorer is a simple, straightforward and easy to understand tool for that. You can easily get a sense of how many backlinks, and what types of backlinks your website has and what types of anchor texts are used to link to your website. You can keep track of new and lost links over time as well as group spammy links in a folder. Furthermore, you can compare your backlink profile with that of other websites such as a competitor’s domain.
February 18, 2020

I miss Open Site Explorer

Scott Walker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Open Site Explorer to gain valuable SEO information for our clients. The tool was fantastic to get an overview of the sites linking to your website (or web page) and get valuable metrics like a Page or Site Authority number. It also gave SEOs a game plan on what to work on to get the site better searchable performance. Removing spam links, building authoritative links, expanding content or getting better authority scores, finding and removing broken links, etc.
  • Estimating Page Authority and Site Authority
  • Listing Linking Domains and Pages
  • It was outdated
  • It featured many disproven metrics
As much as I'd love to recommend Open Site Explorer, Moz has discontinued the program and replaced it with Link Explorer. Though Link Explorer offers some of the same information and has more updated metrics, the old Open Site Explorer also gave more site-wide information that was useful for meta analysis and competitive metrics.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Open Site Explorer (now renamed by Moz to Link Explorer) is used by our marketing team. We use it to improve our SEO performance and understand our inbound link profile. It shows us who links to us (and the value of that link), which keywords we rank for, and our linking progress over time (there's a handy bar chart which shows how many links you gained and lost over time).
  • It links in with Moz’s domain authority concept, which we use as our main metric of how well our SEO works.
  • It shows you which sites link to you, and ranks to them by domain authority. This helps us understand where our best inbound links come from, and to hopefully target those valuable partners for more links.
  • It shows you which keywords you rank for, your position on the search engine results pages for each keyword, and how difficult it is to rank for those keywords. We use this to spot where we rank on the second or third page for medium difficulty keywords. We’ll then write content to target those keywords.
  • You need to subscribe to Moz Pro to get all features, which is pricey if you aren’t using the tool regularly.
  • I’ve found that competitor tools give larger lists of inbound links.
  • You’ll need some understanding of how SEO works to maximize the tool. Would non-SEO specialists understand the difference between domain authority and page authority, or the difference between follow back, and non-follow backlinks? Moz offers lots of training resources, but it takes time to learn what you need.
Open Site Explorer is one tool which marketers use to improve their SEO performance. It highlights strengths and weaknesses in your inbound link profile, which helps you to improve your content strategy and public relations efforts. But, it is only one tool. It does not specialize in other SEO tasks, such as on-page technical optimization.
Jeremy Waszak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I first started using Open Site Explorer 5 years ago when I began my career in SEO. I still use it to this day as an aid in backlink analysis and the development of link building strategies. Open Site Explorer gives me the ability to evaluate not only a client's inbound links but competitors as well which is helpful. Some metrics from OSE include Domain Authority, Page Authority, link root domains, and total inbound links.
  • Gives you a quick overview of your client's backlink health.
  • Easily compare your website's backlink profile vs. competitors.
  • Determine additional link opportunities to help grow inbound links to your site.
  • Lack of instant export of data. Adds to a queue rather than being instant.
  • Advanced reports are needed for larger websites and come at the cost of a subscription to Moz Pro.
A quick, user-friendly, backlink overview of your client's website vs. competitors. While Open Site Explorer goes into some detail, there are better tools for backlink analysis such as Majestic and Ahrefs.
Amber Schlosser | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Open Site Explorer to get insight on what types of inbound links our competition had and what types of links our websites needed. For new websites that our company had, it helped us develop link building strategies; what types of sites to ask for links and how to attract new links.
  • Ability to just see inbound links
  • Makes comparing our links with the competitions' very easy
  • Can export results to Excel
  • Shows keyword that the link is coming from
  • I wish it had suggestions of similar sites that your competition has
I feel like it is better suited for a company who is interested in a link building strategy. If you already know the types of websites you would like to get links from, along with the keywords, then this program might not be for you.
Susan (MacKay) Sisler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
The Search Guru has used Open Site Explorer since Yahoo! Site Explorer merged with Bing Webmaster Tools in November 2011, and we could no longer get competing sites' link data. Open Site Explorer is used mostly by our technical services and analytics reporting teams. It allows us to examine the quality of clients' and competitors' link profiles, including the number of inbound links to the home page and overall site, the number of unique linking domains and the link anchor text. In my opinion the most valuable metric in Open Site Explorer is Domain Authority, or ranking potential of a site based on an algorithmic combination of link metrics. We rely heavily on this number to gauge a site's strength in the search engines compared to other sites in the same space.
  • Easy comparisons of link metrics side by side among 6 sites (target site plus 5 competing sites)
  • Allows filtering of links by link equity, followed and redirected links from both external sites and internal pages
  • Provides an export to Excel for examination of links and easy sorting
  • While Open Site Explorer shows a Domain Authority score for an entire domain and a Page Authority score for a specific URL, it would be helpful to have a Subdomain Authority score for an entire subdomain of pages
  • Excel reports can take a while to be generated depending on how many are in the queue
Moz's Open Site Explorer is a must-have in the SEO professional's toolbox, while an inexperienced user would likely need training to understand how to use this tool. Many important metrics are available within the free version of Open Site Explorer, and the comments in this review have been based solely on the free version. Upgrading to the fee-based Moz Pro unlocks additional features and a suite of tools.
Return to navigation