Moz's Mid-Year Retrospective: Exciting Upgrades from the First Half of 2018

Every year, we publish an overview of all the upgrades we’ve made to our tools and how those changes benefit our customers and Moz Community members. So far, 2018 has been a whirlwind of activity here at Moz — not only did we release a massive, long-awaited update to our link building tool, we've also been improving and updating systems and tools across the board to make your Moz experience even better. To that end, we’re sharing a mid-year retrospective to keep up with the incredible amount of progress we’ve made.

We receive a lot of amazing feedback from our customers on pain points they experience and improvements they’d like to see. Folks, we hear you.

We not only massively restructured some of our internal systems to provide you with better data, we also innovated new ways to display and report on that data, making the tools more accurate and more useful than ever before.

If you’ve been tasked with achieving organic success, we know your job isn’t easy. You need tools that get the job done, and done well. We think Moz delivered.

Check out our 2018 improvements so far:

Our new link index: Bigger, fresher, better than ever

Our link index underwent a major overhaul: it's now 20x larger and 30x fresher than it was previously. This new link index data has been made available via our Mozscape API, as well as integrated into many Moz Pro tools, including Campaigns, Keyword Explorer, the MozBar, and Fresh Web Explorer. But undoubtedly the largest and most-anticipated improvement the new link index allowed us to make was the launch of Link Explorer, which we rolled out at the end of April as a replacement for Open Site Explorer.

Link Explorer addresses and improves upon its predecessor by providing more data, fresher data, and better ways to visualize that data. Answering a long-asked-for feature in OSE, Link Explorer includes historical metrics, and it also surfaces newly discovered and lost links:

Below are just a few of the many ways Link Explorer is providing some of the best link data available:

• Link Explorer’s link index contains approximately 4.8 trillion URLs — that’s 20x larger than OSE and surpasses Ahrefs’ index (~3 trillion pages) and Majestic’s fresh index (~1 trillion pages).
• Link Explorer is 30x fresher than OSE. All data updates every 24 hours.
• We believe Link Explorer is unique in how accurately our link index represents the web, resulting in data quality you can trust.
• Link Explorer has the closest robots.txt profile to Google among the three major link indexes, which means we get more of the links Google gets.
• We also improved Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Spam Score. The size and freshness of our index has allowed us to offer a more stable DA and PA score. Though it will still fluctuate as the index fluctuates (which has always been by design), it will not be as dramatic as it was in Open Site Explorer.

Explore your link profile

You can learn more about Link Explorer by reading Sarah Bird’s announcement, watching Rand’s Whiteboard Friday, or visiting our Link Explorer Help Guide. Even though it's still in beta, Link Explorer already blows away OSE's data quality, freshness, and capabilities. Look for steady improvements to Link Explorer as we continue to iterate on it and add more key features.

New-and-improved On-Page Grader

Moz’s On-Page Grader got a thorough and much-needed overhaul! Not only did we freshen up the interface with a new look and feel, but we also added new features and improved upon our data.

Inside the new On-Page Grader, you’ll find:

• An updated metrics bar to show you Page Title, Meta Description, and the number of Keywords Found. No need to dig through source code!
• An updated Optimization Score to align with the Page Optimization feature that’s inside Campaigns and in the MozBar. Instead of a letter grade (A–F), you now have Page Score (0–100) for a more precise measurement of page optimization performance.
• On-page factors are now categorized so you can see what is hurting or helping your Page Score.
• On-page factors are organized by importance so you can prioritize your efforts. Red indicates high importance, yellow indicates moderate importance, and blue indicates low importance.

On-Page Grader is a great way to take a quick look at how well a page is optimized for a specified keyword. Here’s how it works.

Input your page and the keyword you want that page to rank for…

… and On-Page Grader will return a list of suggestions for improving your on-site optimization.

Check it out!

Keyword ranking data now available for Canada, UK, and Australia

We're very excited to announce that, as of just last week, international data has been added to the Keywords by Site feature of Keyword Explorer! This will now allow Moz Pro customers to see which keywords they rank for and assess their visibility across millions of SERPs, now encompassing the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia! Keywords by Site is a newer feature within Keyword Explorer, added just last October to show which and how many keywords any domain, subdomain, or page ranks for.

Want to see which keywords your site ranks for in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia?

See what you rank for

It's easy to use — just select a country from the dropdown menu to the right. This will show you which keywords a domain or page is ranking for from a particular country.

On-Demand Crawl now available

We know it can be important to track your site changes in real time. That's why, on June 29th, we're replacing our legacy site audit tool, Crawl Test, with the new and improved On-Demand Crawl:

Whether you need to double-check a change you've made or need a one-off report, the new On-Demand Crawl offers an updated experience for Moz Pro customers:

• Crawl reports are now faster and available sooner, allowing you to quickly assess your site, a new client or prospect’s, or the competition.
• Your site issues are now categorized by issue type and quantity, making it easier to identify what to work on and how to prioritize:

• Recommendations are now provided for how to fix each issue, along with resources detailing why it matters:

• Site audit reports are now easier than ever to package and present with PDF exports.
• An updated, fresh design and UX!

On-Demand Crawl is already available now in Moz Pro. If you’re curious how it works, check it out:

Try On-Demand Crawl

Improvements to tool notifications & visuals

Moz’s email notification system and tools dashboard didn't always sync up perfectly with the actual data update times. Sometimes, customers would receive an email or see updated dates on their dashboard before the data had rolled out, resulting in confusion. We've streamlined the process, and now customers no longer have to wonder where their data is — you can rest assured that your data is waiting for you in Moz Pro as soon as you're notified.

Rank Tracker is sticking around

While we had originally planned to retire Rank Tracker at the beginning of June, we've decided to hold off in light of the feedback we received from our customers. Our goal in retiring Rank Tracker was to make Moz Pro easier to navigate by eliminating the redundancy of having two options for tracking keyword rankings (Rank Tracker and Campaigns), but after hearing how many people use and value Rank Tracker, and after weighing our options, we decided to postpone its retirement until we had a better solution than simply shutting it down.

Right now, we’re focused on learning more from our community on what makes this tool so valuable, so if you have feedback regarding Rank Tracker, we’d love it if you would take our survey. The information we gather from this survey will help us create a better solution for you!

Updates from Moz Academy

New advanced SEO courses

In response to the growing interest in advanced and niche-specific training, Moz is now offering ongoing classes and seminars on topics such as e-commerce SEO and technical site audits. If there’s an advanced topic you’d like training on, let us know by visiting https://moz.com/training and navigating to the “Custom” tab to tell us exactly what type of training you’re looking for.

On-demand coursework

We love the fact that we have Moz customers from around the globe, so we’re always looking for new ways to accommodate those in different timezones and those with sporadic schedules. One new way we’re doing this is by offering on-demand coursework. Get training from Moz when it works best for you. With this added scheduling flexibility (and with added instructors to boot), we hope to be able to reach more people than ever before.

To view Moz’s on-demand coursework, visit moz.com/training and click on the “On-Demand” tab.

Certificate development

There’s been a growing demand for a meaningful certification program in SEO, and we’re proud to say that Moz is here to deliver. This coursework will include a certificate and a badge for your LinkedIn profile. We’re planning on launching the program later this year, so stay tuned by signing up for Moz Training Alerts!

Tell us what you think!

Have feedback for us on any of our 2018 improvements? Any ideas on new ways we can improve our tools and training resources? Let us know in the comments! We love hearing from marketers like you. Your input helps us develop the best tools possible for ensuring your content gets found online.

If you’re not a Moz Pro subscriber and haven’t gotten a chance to check out these new features yet, sign up for a free trial!