Majestic’s enhanced tool now gives SEOs a lot more useful context about backlinks

All links aren’t created equal. We all know that but Majestic now provides much more insight into the precise context into why and where links appear.

Geeking out like never before. Earlier this week the company announced upgrades that allow SEOs to explore links in much more depth. The tool now organizes webpages into 40 segments and provides visibility into where backlinks physically appear on the page, what text surrounds them and internal and external link density. This helps more easily determine which links are more valuable and potentially uncovers new linkbuilding opportunities.

Dashoboard view of British Heart Foundation link context

Search/sort/filter. According to Dixon Jones, Majestic’s Global Brand Ambassador, the new capabilities allow SEOs to do things like:

• Find all the backlinks to a domain where any keyword is used in the surrounding text.
• Find “DoFollow” links that lie in on the top 20% of a web page.
• Find links which are bundled tightly with other links, so likely to spam be directory listings.
• Find links on high value pages which do not contain many other external links.

The tool offers numerous ways to search, sort and filter the data to get to some pretty precise and esoteric results.

Link context visualization. One particularly noteworthy innovation is Majestic’s link context chart that helps visualize all this information, and for which they are seeking a patent. Accordingly, the graphic below presents a link analysis of five different types of sites. The green box illustrates where the link appears on the page. The blue bars are internal links and the yellow represent external links.

Visualization of distinct types of links from different websites

Why we should care. Beyond being a helpful auditing tool, the enhancements should make it a more useful and effective tool for link building. 

The video below offers an overview and visual product tour from Dixon Jones. There’s also an in-depth guide (.pdf) to the new capabilities that goes into significantly more detail than I have above.