mat t hewwo o dward.co .ukhttp://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/experiments/ahrefs-majestic-seo-1-million-domain-showdown/

Matthew Woodward

Update #3: Ahrefs vs Majestic SEO – The 1 Million DomainShowdown

If you don’t have t ime to read this post terminate your Majestic SEO account immediately & take outthe Ahrefs trial instead without hesitation.

UPDATE # 1: PLEASE SEE MAJESTIC’S RESPONSE AT THE END OF THIS POSTUPDATE # 2: AHREFS RESPONSE – FIXES APPLIED – NEW DATAUPDATE # 3: MAJESTIC GO ALL OUT

The which backlink checker is best argument constantly shows up on f orums.

I tried to get to the bottom of this with my Ahref s vs Majestic SEO vs SEOMoz vs Raven Tools vs SEOSpyglass post at the start of the year.

This highlighted that the top perf ormer Ahref s f ound 2.27% more links than its closest competitor MajesticSEO.

To be honest the post didn’t go down well with some people.

To f ully enjoy this post you need to listen to this in the background, on repeat. Do it now!

Interesting Background Story

When I published the original comparison post it sparked a lot of controversy. I had just setup a small test tosee which is better based on 3 sites I own and have f ull visibility and control of .

It turned out that lots of customers of the f eatured companies were writ ingin and ref erencing my post to see what was going on.

One person that had to deal with this was Viktar Khamianok the CEO of LinkAssistant who make SEO Spyglass. They were ranked bottom of the resultsand he published this f ollow up to explain why.

Hats of f to Viktar f or dealing with it in the way that he did! Customers lovetransparency but companies are terrif ied by it – kudos sir!

The Majestic SEO team chose to respond very dif f erently with the marketingCEO Dixon Jones taking the lead.

It started with this comment on the article-

Hi.

I’m a director here at Majestic. Thanks for the study.

It is true that Ahrefs are increasing their index size. However, using resources for “discovery” comes

at a cost. The cost is the calculation as to the quality of each link.

It’s hard to comment on a study marked Site A, Site B, Site C. The data is public for all the data setsexcept GWT, so I see no reason why studies can’t use verifiable sites.

You also did not specify whether you used Majestic’s Fresh or Historic Index. As you dig into thosedata sets you will find some links only one index and some only in the other, however – bothindexes are excellent for different types of analysis.

Dropping into the analysis, however, is where analysis REALLY needs exploring in 2013. Penguintells us that it is quality, Not quantity that will count from here on in. Looking at the top 20 links ineach list will probably be plenty to come to a conclusion that may not be the one you suggest.

Anyway – can you list the three sites you used for the analysis?

The f irst line of his response is to instantly discredit the competit ion – I don’t like that, its not their f ault youcame second no matter how you dress it up.

But he does make some very valuable and crit ical points, I had used a small dataset that I had chosen to keepanonymous.

A couple of days af ter Dixons comment on the 14th January 2013 Ann Smarty stopped by to leave a comment!Yes, Ann Smarty herself !

I was totally stoked because I have f ollowed her f or a number of years, and now here she is on my blog! Wow!

Thanks for the test! I didn’t know Raven and SEO SpyGlass had their own indices. I thought theywere using someone else’s APIs

As for Majestic, have you tried using their “Historic” index as well? It returns much more data in myexperience.

She also makes a valuable point in that those 2 indexes do return dif f erent datasets.

The Twist In The Tale

A couple of weeks later on February 5th Ann Smarty wrote this post – aHref s versus MajesticSEO: The RealTest

Interesting choice of post name, and very similar to what I had published and she had commented on just acouple of weeks earlier.

You would have thought that f or the benef it of the readers and to of f er them the braodest look at the debateshe would have ref erenced my post as well – no dice.

Especially when you read this line-

since there have been a few rather vague comparisons recently, here’s the indepth experiment.

I can understand why she didn’t include my results though, I mean her dataset f ocuses on 100 random domainswhile mine f ocuses on only 3.

You should read that post though so you get a better understanding of the tools.

Then Dixon dropped this comment on the article-

Thanks ever so much for writing this all up Ann. For the record I have a clear and obviouspreference for MajesticSEO.

Jacob: There were (as Link Assistant or Spyglass or someone said) quite a few things foundwanting only the Matthew Woodward post. The most glaringly obvious is that the analysis was donewith three sites he knows well, but will not disclose. Three sites with clear bias vs 100 sites with arandom element is a significant difference.

What wasn’t said was this: I don’t know whether he included his own site in his list of three, but theobjective nature of the analysis gets stretched further when you see that he is blocking Majestic’sbot but not Ahrefs’: https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer?folder=&IndexDataSource=F&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.matthewwoodward.co.uk%2F

(You need access to the site explorer to see the block in this link). You also won’t see the robots.txtfile unless you know what you are looking for. Now – we do not need to crawl his site to see linksTO his site, but if he insists on saying one system is better than another, he really shouldn’t makethe claim on a site which shows such obvious bias.

There. I said it. I tried to bite my lip for a few weeks, but good people are reading that review andnot seeing the lack of objectivity.

Seeing as we aren’t bit ing lips anymore-

Notice how he opens up and highlights his bias which af ter establishing, allows him to start pointing the biasf inger.

Marketing 101 f olks. Establish, Finger. Prof it.

I actually made a Dixon based meme with those words to go here – but I removed it during editing to be nice. Butif you guys want it…

Either way he has the right approach, I’m doing exactly that with this blog! One day I’ll f inger you with a paidproduct – in f act i’m f ingering you right now because this post will probably earn me af f iliate commision.

Anyway as you can tell, that didn’t sit well with me-

Hi,

Dixon I have noted the weaknesses in my initial tests from various sources and while you suggestmy test was done with ‘bias’ because they are 3 of my sites at random is complete bullshit.

I realise I left to much wiggle room for people to come up with justifications as to why Majestic didn’twin the test.

To be honest I didn’t think it would cause this much of a stir!

The follow up test is going to leave no wiggle room and make this ‘random’ URL sample lookinsignificant.

And seeing as your doing everything you can to discredit me and my data, I’ll also be highlightingthe relationship between Ann Smarty, yourselves and IMN. I wonder how many people read thisvery post and weren’t aware of that?

For a CEO to come out and try to discredit people makes you look very weak – you should take aleaf out of Viktar Khamianok’s book and handle it like a boss http://www.link-assistant.com/blog/backlink-checkers-compared-seo-spyglass-ahrefs-majestic-seo-seomoz-raven-tools/

We’ll see how random those 100 URL’s really were with my follow up – its going to be air tight thistime.

ps. I dont see what in my robots.txt file http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/robots.txt would beblocking it?

To explain a f ew things here. It turns out that my new host WPEngine blocks Majestic at the server level bef oreit ever reaches my site – Dixon personally investigated this and conf irmed that to be the case.

The ironic thing about all of this though, is his claim of bias.

What Dixon didn’t know is that the company behind SEO Spyglass had just given me over $2,000 worth ofprizes f or my readers.

They came last in my test.

Seeing as Dixon leans on it heavily in his argument, and establishes he is not biased – lets explore that f or asecond and put all of our cards on the table.

The Ahrefs / Majest ic SEO / Ann Smarty Relat ionship

This is where things get interesting.

Ann Smarty is the community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com (IMN) which is a highly successf ulinternet marketing agency.

Actually its the f irst IM agency site I’ve ever come across where I think, they actually know what they are talkingabout! Check them out!

IMN also control sites like WebmasterWorld, SEOChat, Crea8aSiteForums, ThreadWatch and so f orth.

Up until the start of February – Ahref s and IMN were in a partnership together. In f act Ahref s linked to IMN inthe f ooter!

On the 1st February 2013 the partnership between Ahref s and IMN ended.

By the 8th of February 2013 IMN had plastered promotions f or Majestic SEO all over their network of sites.

It was latest discovered that on the 29th January 2013 this tweet was made on the Ahref s Twitter account.

That Tweet not only promotes Dixon, but if you read the linked posts is all about Majestic SEO – Ahref s maincompetitor.

According to the Ahref s team, IMN were in control of Ahref s social media accounts at this t ime and they did notmake the tweet themselves.

Timeline of events

To make it easy to understand-

11th Jan – I publish my init ial comparison post

11th Jan – Dixon is aware and submits a comment

14th Jan – Ann Smarty is aware and submits a comment

29th Jan – IMN (Ann Smarty is a manager) posts a Tweet on Ahref s account promoting Dixon (Majestic)

01st Feb – The relationship between IMN and Ahref s ends

05th Feb – Ann Smarty publishes her 100 random domain comparison

05th Feb – Dixon Jones (Majestic) discredits my posts and says I’m biased

08th Feb – Majestic SEO banners start appearing on IMN properties

08th Feb – Dixon f inally gets in touch with me directly in the correct manner

I’ll let you do the math on that.

I should highlight that since Dixon got in touch with me he has being very f riendly behind closed doors, its ashame he didnt take that approach in the public domain.

However that doesn’t come bef ore telling it how it is and how this post transpired.

In the public domain he chose to discredit me, competitors and vaguely string together bias, publically. He putme in a posit ion where I have to def end myself publically.

All the other people in my original test sent me a nice email asking how they could help.

My Relat ionships

I should also make you aware of my relationships upf ront with each party that is involved-

Majestic SEOEverything you see here plus a f ew f riendly private emails clearing the air, diagnosing the host issue and

discussing my f ollow up. I init ially delayed this test f or Majestic to roll out new f eatures so it wasn’t invalidated.Dixon called me out publically and disputed the original test, this is my air t ight response.

AhrefsThey have provided me with API access to conduct the test f ree of charge and f illed in some of the holesabove. They are also of f ering the same access to any blogger that will independently verif y this test, see theend of this post f or details. I also use their af f iliate links throughout this post, Majestic do not have an af f iliateprogram or I would use theirs as well.

Ann SmartyI’m a long time reader of her content and a f an.

Internet Marketing NinjasIt is hard not to know who they are, I know of them – never dealt with them or any employee to my knowledge.

So Which One Is Better?

So all of this has distracted f rom the route question, which is better – Ahref s or Majestic SEO?

Only cold hard data can decide!

In Dixons ef f orts to discredit me and highlight bias, he did raise some valid points that cannot be ignored-

1. The original test was done with 3 of my personal sites I would not disclose

2. That makes the entire test biased in Dixons opinion

3. The data set was very small with just 3 sites analysed and compared

4. The results could not be independently verif ied

I promised that the “The follow up test is going to leave no wiggle room and make this ‘random’ URL sample lookinsignificant.”

So with the points above and that promise in mind, I give you-

Ahrefs vs Majestic SEO – The 1 Million Domain Showdown

My original post used 3 of my own sites, Ann Smartys posts used 100 sites.

This post is going to use 1 million sites. No more messing about eh?

The Test Details

This is how this test is put together – you will be able to independently verif y all of these results yourself ,instructions at the end of the post.

Init ial Data Source – The Majestic Million

For those that don’t know, the Majestic SEO team publish what is called the Majestic Million.

The Majestic Million is a list of the top 1 million website in the world, based on the number of ref erring IP’sf ound f or that domain in the f resh index.

These are the 1 million sites that Majestic SEO has more f resh backlink data on than any others.

So with this, Majestic SEO are outright telling us these are the sites they know the most about in terms ofbacklinks.

Out of all of their data, these 1 million sites are the most linked to in the world according to them.

So thats the “bias” taken care of upf ront.

You can download a copy f or yourself f ree of charge and it will tell you the total number of linking subnets(Ref SubNets) and the total number of linking IPs (Ref IPs) f or each domain in the top million.

Making The Comparison

To compare Majestic SEO with Ahref s I’m going to look up the total number of linking subnets and IP’s f or all ofthe domains in the majestic million.

To give you an example with this blog-

Majestic SEO – This report shows 209 IP’s & 193 subnets

Ahref s – This report shows 331 IP’s & 288 subnets

So in that specif ic instance, Ahref s wins the test.

Now imagine doing the same – but f or 1 million sites.

That is the test I have done based on what Majestic say are the top 1 million sites in the world in terms of links.

Like I said – no wiggle room this t ime.

This is what the CSV data looks like in its raw f orm-

Don’t be fooled by what you can see in that image though!

Feel f ree to download a copy of the data that is used in this test.

The Test Results

With such a huge amount of data I decided to split the results into 10 groups of 100,000 URLs and thencompare those groups.

This is what the group numbers look like (refer to by_groups.csv in the data pack)-

GroupAhref Wins

(IP)Majestic Wins

(IP)Ahref Wins

(Subnet)Majestic Wins

(Subnet)

1-100,000 79,487 20,512 72,195 27,804

100,001-200,000 76,273 23,727 70,251 29,749

200,001-300,000 71,848 28,152 65,871 34,129

300,001-400,000 71,135 28,865 64,879 35,121

400,001-500,000 65,936 34,064 59,380 40,620

500,001-600,000 69,528 30,472 62,583 37,417

600,001-700,000 69,718 30,282 63,126 36,874

700,001-800,000 69,085 30,915 62,998 37,002

800,001-900,000 68,856 31,144 61,243 38,757

900,001-1,000,000

67,806 32,118 60,211 39,713

Just looks like a bunch of meaningless numbers right?

What about now-

Wins By IP Address

Wins By IPs Ahref s MajesticS...020.00040.00060.00080.0001-100000100001-200000200001-300000300001-400000400001-500000500001-600000600001-700000700001-800000800001-900000900001-1000000

Wins By Subnets

Wins By Subnets Ahref s MajesticS...10.00030.00050.00070.00090.0001-100000100001-200000200001-300000300001-400000400001-500000500001-600000600001-700000700001-800000800001-900000900001-1000000

Pretty brutal to look at if you are a current Majestic SEO customer right?

Now might be the right t ime to switch to Ahref s – click here to claim a f ree account.

But bef ore you do lets look at the totals-

Wins Ahrefs Majestic

IP Wins 709,673 291,250

Subnet Wins 642,737 358,186

In wee pretty graph f ormat-

Total WinsAhref sMajesticSEO100.000300.000500.000700.000900.000IP WinsSubnet Wins

Ahrefs Vs Majestic SEO Conclusion

Irrespective of opinion, relationships, bias and discreditation – the data does not lie.

The data never lies, its why I love working with data so much. Want to settle which design is better? Test it.

Want to see which is the best backlink checker? Test it.

Data does not lie.

Ahref s is clearly the winner here by a huge margin – a much larger margin than my init ial test with just 3domains highlighted.

In the Wins by IP test, Ahref s is f inding more than twice the amount than Majestic SEO is – 57% more to beexact. They are winning on 71% of domains compared to Majestic SEO’s 29%.

In the Wins by Subnets test, Ahref s is still the clear winner f inding 284,551 more links than Majestic SEO. Theyare winning on 64% of domains compared to Majestic SEO’s 36%.

So quite clearly, the best backlink checker is Ahrefs PERIOD.

Even if the source data is Majestic SEO’s very own Majestic Million – Ahref s still knows more about them thanMajestic does.

UPDATE # 1: PLEASE SEE MAJESTIC’S RESPONSE AT THE END OF THIS POSTUPDATE # 2: AHREFS RESPONSE – FIXES APPLIED – NEW DATAUPDATE # 3: MAJESTIC GO ALL OUT

How To Verify The Data For Yourself

In an ef f ort to be unbiased and transparent I have 2 seperate ways f or you to independently verif y the datayourself .

All of the data used in this test is available to download here.

Verif icat ion Method #1 – Easy

This is the easiest way to spot check the data.

1. Download the source data

2. Open the by_domains.csv f ile

3. Select a line at random

4. Enter the domain f rom column A into the search box at Majestic SEO and Ahref s

5. For Majestic SEO look at Referring IP addresses and Referring Class C subnets:

6. For Ahref s look at Referring IPs and Referring subnets

You can manually spot check these at random!

Verif icat ion Method #2 – Hard

What if you want to verif y the data f or all million domains though?

Well f or that you will need a linux server with shell access, an Ahref s API key and these f iles.

WARNING: Bef ore you do this be aware that 1,000,000 API credits with Ahref s costs $10,000.

For f ull transparency’s sake Ahref s gave me an API key with 1,000,000 credits so I could run this test.

If any established bloggers want to confirm these results themselves and publish on their blog thenplease get in touch with me.

To try and remove any doubt around this test I asked the Ahref s team if there was a way people could verif ythe results in bulk independently which isn’t possible.

So they suggesteed that they will provide API keys to other established bloggers to conf irm and publish theresults themselves.

This should help remove any wiggle room f or discreditation of the test or data.

Anyway here is how to do it-

1. Download this & you will f ind 2 f iles, get_stats.php and load.sh

2. Open get_stats.php and update it with your Ahref s API key on line 3

3. Download the Majestic Million CSV

4. Upload get_stats.php, load.sh & majestic_million.csv to your server

5. Make sure all of the f iles are in the same f older

6. Connect to your server with an SSH client and execute the load.sh script

7. Wait a f ew hours

8. This will output a f ile called by_domains.txt, rename to by_domains.csv

Signing Off

Remember f olks regardless of all of the controversy the data does not lie.

The simple f act is Ahref s knows 57% more about Majestic SEO’s Majestic Million than they do.

You can sign up f or a f ree Ahref s account here.

If I ever meet Dixon at a conf erence hopef ully he won’t drop kick me through a table. Perhaps I would let himwrite Majestic SEO across my head in permanent marker f or an hour though =D

Next t ime you see this topic in a forum – feel free to use this post to instantly win the argument.

Download A Printable PDF Of This Post

Just share this post to download a printable PDF of this post f or you to keep f orever & ever!

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Update #1: Majestic SEO’s Initial Response

Alex Chudnovsky the Majestic SEO managing director submitted this in a comment but it is only f air this ishighlighted and made part of the post.

Here is what he had to say-

It’s nice to see that Majestic Million data that we offer for free would cost $10000 elsewhere.

Data does not lie, but it can be wrong/bogus/false and a good analyst would always keep an eye foranomalies before jumping to big conclusions.

We are pretty busy right now setting up new hardware, so we’ll get back to you on this in detail nextweek, in the meantime I think you should double check your key numbers – ahrefs appears to bethe only backlink provider which somehow shows MORE referring IPs/subnets than number ofreferring domains (that’s like 2+2=5).

Using your own example listed in the post above –

http://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/matthewwoodward.co.uk

Referring IPs: 331Referring subnets: 288Referring domains: 282

Naturally at least one of those numbers is incorrect.

We can’t easily get list of those IPs, but the referring domain count is confirmed by External links tabusing 1 link per ref domain limit –

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/backlinks/subdomains/matthewwoodward.co.uk/unique-domains/all-all

This shows 282 matches, the same as on the overview page… the same but potentially misleading.How many of you know that ahrefs counts hostnames as referring domains? It’s easy to check –

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/refdomains/subdomains/matthewwoodward.co.uk/substring-blogspot.com

There are 3 referring domains shown there when limiting them to blogspot.com:

1) seojunkis.blogspot.com2) 1chicagocarpetcleaner.blogspot.com3) ongoogleadsense.blogspot.com

It’s the same root domain (blogspot.com) and Majestic counts it as 1 referring domain. Every majorback link provider does the same as otherwise numbers will be artificially inflated and likely tomislead those who’d trust them blindly.

Perhaps you should ask ahrefs why their ratio of IPs/RefDomains is over 1 (this is just wrong),whereas more typical ratio is a lot less, for example Open Site Explorer (OSE) shows 85 linking Cblocks (subnets) and 174 ref domains – ratio of 0.48 and in our case it is 193/287=0.67. For bigdomains such as google.com this ratio will be a lot lower – 0.024 in Majestic’s case and 0.032 inOSE. Homework – calculate same ratio for ahrefs and spot another anomaly shown for google.com!

We’ll get back to you on this next week with a more detailed answer but I hope that you’ll getexplanation from ahrefs on their innovative counting of referring IPs that can be greater than thenumber of referring domains.

cheers

Alex

Alex ChudnovskyManaging DirectorMajestic SEO

We’ll see what the Ahref s team say tomorrow, I’m going to sleep its late here. Get a f eeling I’m going to wakeup to war!

Update #2 – Ahrefs Bites Back

The Ahref s team have just sent me this update through. I’m uber busy at the moment but this update and newset of data is going to take some time to digest and turn into graphs.

Will probably do that across the weekend, but here is what they had to say-

First of all, thank you, Matt, for such a high-quality approach to comparison and data verification.

Really, there is nothing surprising in the fact that Ahrefs won this test. At the moment, our index is25% larger in size and our crawler runs 2-3 times faster. With this initial parameters under our belt,Ahrefs will win any objective test held on a large sample of domains.

With regard to the comments made by Alex Chudnovsky.

1. The fact that Ahrefs counts hostnames instead of referring domains – this is not true. We countthe actual domains but there are exceptions, there are domains the subdomains of which areconsidered as separate domains, and I can explain why.

For example, blogspot.com. On this domain, all subdomains represent someone’s blogs, that is,every subdomain has its owner who controls it. In fact, subdomains of blogspot.com do not differmuch from regular domains in the .com zone.

Large quantity of ref domains is treated by search engines as a good sign – but why? Because theyare more difficult to obtain! But if we are talking about blogspot, it is difficult to get links fromdifferent subdomains over there.

In other words, we believe that Google and other search engines treat every blog on blogspot.comas a separate domain, because it is reasonable to do so. Therefore, we also show each blog as aseparate domain. Due to this, on the Referring Domains tab at Ahrefs you can see every blogseparately instead of one and the same blogspot.com which renders little information. It is important

separately instead of one and the same blogspot.com which renders little information. It is importantwhether it is 1, 10, or 1000 blogs that links to you.

Other examples of services which we consider to be an exception: livejournal.com, wordpress.com,tumblr.com, webs.com.The fact that we do not put all domains in the same row blindly, that we look at their features and tryto be closer to the interpretation of a domain similar to the one by search engines – I think it’s ouradvantage.

2. Speaking about the cost of data of $10,000. I wonder how much it costs to users to make1,000,000 API requests to get these stats from MajesticSEO? I mean the API which allows to furtherdistribute the data. I did not find any prices on the website. Maybe someone knows and can dropme a line about it in the comments?

3. Number of IPs and referring domains. Thanks to your comments, we now have found a couple ofsmall bugs in the calculation of IPs. The first one – the old IPs were not always disposed, and thesecond one – the query for the number of referring domains for popular domains could fail with atimeout (this is what happened to Google.com). The problems have been fixed already, as you cansee – one of them worked in favor of Ahrefs, the second one – in favor of Majestic SEO. I used thescripts that Matt shared to get the stats again and to check whether those issues were significant.

The result:By IP Ahrefs wins 70% domains Majestic SEO 30%By Subnets Ahrefs wins 63% domains Majestic SEO 37%

As I mentioned in the beginning, Ahrefs has an objectively larger index and a faster crawler, so it isnot surprising at all that we will win any test; minor errors will not change the overall picture.

I will send Matt the archive with these files so anyone could double-check the data.

By the way, thank you guys for your attention to these discrepancies. This is cool to get a bug reportfrom the competitors, I do not think that we could have gained it under any other conditions

I do not want to be in debt and, in turn, will tell you about a few situations when 2 +2 = 5 whenit comes to domains and IPs.

There are at least two reasons why there can be more Referring IPs than Referring Domains.

The first case:The same domain can have multiple IP addresses. Usually this is done to spread the load. Moreinformation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS

The second case:Let’s suppose, X is the domain for which there are only three backlinks from these pages:

http://subdomain1.domain.com/index.html is located on the server with IP 1.1.1.1http://subdomain2.domain.com/index.html is located on the server with IP 2.2.2.2http://subdomain3.domain.com/index.html is located on the server with IP 3.3.3.3

It turns out that Domain X has only one referring domain (domain.com) but 3 referring IPs (1.1.1.1,2.2.2.2, 3.3.3.3)

In any case, I am glad that you have started to actively improve your index.

We enjoy competition and look forward to having a strong opponent in this field.

Dmitry GerasimenkoCEO

A very interesting response that directly deals with all of the issues raised.

It seems that Majestic did uncover some f laws with the Ahref s data and highlight 2 bugs that caused dataissues but these are resolved within 24 hours of them being identif ied.

This hasn’t had much of an impact f or Majestic though, previously Ahref s won on 71% of domains by IP whichis now reduced to 70%.

Wins on subnet were previously 64% and is now residing at 63%!

I haven’t had time to verif y the new data yet but if you want to do so you can download it here.

Update #3 – Majestic Goes All Out

Majestic have now published a f ull response on their blog.

It is pretty hard to digest so stick with it but it does touch on some good points.

Our full response to the points raised in your original piece can be foundon our blog.

I hope this serves as a useful summary of our position for your readership:

We welcome comparisons between aspects of our product offering and those ofour competitors. We believe that the best comparisons will follow the modelset by the SeoMoz Open Site Explorer / Majestic SEO shoot out ( link tohttp://www.stonetemple.com/majestic-seo-open-site-explorer-shootout/ ) -comparing various aspects of the product offering in order to achieve abalanced review. Naturally, different people have different needs from theirlink intelligence toolset, and we respect that for some, regardless of datasize and quality, Ahrefs may be a better match for their particular needs atpresent.

We believe that the evidence from Ahrefs – which we first became aware offrom your blog, for which we are grateful, demonstrates that they calculateIP, and Domain counts in a manner that we believe exaggerates the size oftheir index, certainly when used in comparison of size against our FreshIndex. We also present evidence that suggests that our Fresh Index is likelyto be larger than Ahrefs – based on an update of the test you describedafter we fixed a bug in our system. We haven’t tested our Historic index aswe are confident it would “win” by a significant margin.

Both Ahrefs and Majestic have sufficiently large index’s ( in terms of our“Fresh” product ) that we do not feel that size alone provides a realisticcomparison. Comparisons of crawl rate are also meaningless – our crawl hasundergone a massive upgrade – and is far more intelligent, crawling sitesmore sensitively than ever before, whilst achieving a deeper crawl rate. We

don’t want our bots crashing around like a bull in the china shop – it isn’tgood for us and it isn’t good for the industry as a whole. That’s why wehave invested in innovating with tools like flow metrics, and link profiles,and continue to do so.

I’ll close with the same conclusion as in our post – Competition is good, itserves the market well, and forces all involved to invest in innovation. Thereal winners in this battle for market share are the end users. It’s anexciting time to be an SEO.

Alex Chudnovsky,Majestic SEO Managing Director

What do you think? Have we got an answer to the core question of which one is best yet?