Analyze your inbound links with ease
February 16, 2019
Analyze your inbound links with ease
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Open Site Explorer
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.
- 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.