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Open Site Explorer, used by The Search Guru's technical services and analytics reporting teams, is a valuable tool for examining the …
Starting at $99 per month
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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…
Recent Reviews
Popular Features
- Competitive analysis (8)9.090%
- Backlink management (7)9.090%
- Site audit / diagnostics (6)8.585%
- SERP ranking tracking (6)8.383%
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
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What is Moz Link Explorer?
Moz Link Explorer Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
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).
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(33)
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!
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- Pros
- Cons
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
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February 18, 2020
I miss Open Site Explorer
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
68.75%
6.9
67.5%
6.8
100%
10.0
- Took hours of manual work and programatically did it in a few clicks
- Gave a game plan for future SEO strategies
When it still existed, Open Site Explorer was one of, if not the, best freemium SEO tools. Not only did its free-tier offer amazing insights and data for SEO strategy, but its paid program offered additional resources for SEO. I think it worked better than Screaming Frog because it didn't live on your machine and thus was a cloud tool. Its interface was fresher than some of the other tools. And, before it was replaced, it was probably the most authoritative tool for SEO testing and evaluating.
February 16, 2019
Analyze your inbound links with ease
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.
38.75%
3.9
35%
3.5
75%
7.5
- It helps us to track our inbound link performance over time.
- It shows us which inbound links are harmful (i.e. spam). We then remove them to increase our SEO performance.
- It has an awesome new feature called "link intersect," which lets you spot which sites link to competitors but not to your site.
Ahrefs is an awesome tool and, I'd say, more in-depth than Open Site Explorer. It tends to give more detailed lists of inbound links. But, we use Open Site Explorer because we use other tools in Moz Pro. We track our domain authority (a Moz concept) and we use the MozBar to view the SEO rating of other sites. We like to stay in the Moz ecosystem.
February 04, 2015
Open Site Explorer: OSE a must for SEO
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
- Better insight into our clients' website authority and rankings
- Ability to easily diagnose any unnatural link patterns
- Saves time over having to use multiple link tools
Yahoo! Site Explorer is no longer available outside of a Bing Webmaster Tools account. While there are plenty of fee-based link evaluation tools, Moz's Open Site Explorer provides a robust set of features and metrics in its free version that no other site can match. Moz also has a longstanding, highly regarded reputation among SEO professionals for providing helpful information and high quality products.
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