Open Site Explorer: OSE a must for SEO
Updated February 04, 2015
Open Site Explorer: OSE a must for SEO
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Open Site Explorer
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.