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Glossary

This section explains the meanings behind some of the terms used on the website.

Metrics

Alexa Rank

The term Alexa Rank refers to an algorithm calculation of Alexa traffic ranking from users, such as reach and page views, who have an Alexa toolbar installed.

Citation Flow

Citation Flow is a trademark of Majestic. Citation Flow is a score between 0-100 which helps to measure the link equity or "power" the website or link carries. Citation flow is used in conjunction with "Trust Flow". Together the Citation Flow and Trust Flow form the Majestic Flow Metrics algorithm.

Citation Flow represents an evolutionary leap from our old metric - ACRank - and predicts how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it. Links are now not all created with equal weight - and because a strong link will have a relatively stronger influence on URLs, Citation Flow is based on stronger, iterative mathematical logic than the old metric of ACRank.

Flow Metrics

"Flow Metric" is a registered trademark of Majestic. Flow Metrics are unique measures determined and created by Majestic. The scores flow through the entire web and use a logarithmic scale. Flow Metrics are expressed as numbers between 0 and 100, the higher the number, the stronger the signal. Flow Metrics measure both Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

Find out more about Flow Metrics by watching our How to Video.

Topical Trust Flow

Topical Trust Flow is a Majestic trademark. This is a Majestic feature which provides website categorisation. Majestic has now categorised the web so users can see in which industry sector the website has influence. The Topical Trust Flow helps users find influencers for specific categories and easily determine if a link clear up is required. Topical Trust Flow provides a series of numbers, on a log based scale between 0-100. The number shows the relative influence of a web page, subdomain or root domain in any given topic or category.

Trust Flow

Trust Flow, a trademark of Majestic, is a score based on quality, on a scale between 0-100. Majestic collated many trusted seed sites based on a manual review of the web. This process forms the foundation of Majestic Trust Flow. Sites closely linked to a trusted seed site can see higher scores, whereas sites that may have some questionable links would see a much lower score.

Site Definitions

Domain

A domain is the main part of a website address. It is usually what your website is called. For example in www.majestic.com, the domain would be "majestic.com". Within the Majestic system, this is also known as a root domain.

Long Domain

Long domain is something extra added to a root domain, making it into a subdomain. For example, www.example.com or thisisan.example.com are long domains of the root domain example.com.

Path

A path is the route used to specify and locate a resource. It is commonly everything in a URL that appears after the root domain.

Subdomain

A Subdomain is a domain that is part of a primary domain. Rather than registering a new domain name, often a subdomain is created as a "second website". For example www.majestic.com is the primary domain and blog.majestic.com is a subdomain.

URL

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is an address to a resource on the Internet. It is often referred to as a web address when used with HTTP.

Tools

Advanced Report (play video)

An Advanced report is available within the Majestic tool and provides access to all of the data we have crawled on any given domain, subdomain, path or URL. Advanced reports give a greater level of detail and insight into the data surrounding backlinks, referring domains, top level domains, country, subnets, as well as other categories.

API (Application Programming Interface)

API stands for an Application Programming Interface. This is an interface, which allows access to Majestic data for application development and automated queries. Majestic has three classes of API.

  1. Our OpenApps API is available with a Platinum subscription. OpenApps will let you create third party applications that any user with a Majestic account can then link to and access. Developers using OpenApps are responsible for providing support for their applications.
  2. Our standard API (previously called our Enterprise API) is available with a Platinum subscription for internal use only; (i.e. you are not able to then resell or use the data within external applications). Larger allowances are available if the Platinum subscription does not fit your requirements.
  3. Our Premium Partner API facilitates the building of web and public facing applications. Reseller API deals are individually negotiated, and typically cost several thousands of pounds a month. Should you be interested in the Reseller API, please email [email protected].

Bulk Backlink Checker Limit

This is a limit to the number of domains or URLs you can add at any one time to the "Bulk Backlink Checker" tool. You can find more information on our tools through the How to Videos section via the blog.

Google Search Console; (formerly Google Webmaster Tools)

This is a free service provided by Google which allow webmasters/website owners to disavow links, check, and optimize the visibility of their websites.

Standard Report

This type of report will show you the Top Backlinks pointing to a domain, subdomain, path or URL. It is possible to generate a standard report for any site within our Fresh or Historic Index. The Top Backlinks noted within the report are calculated using the Flow Metrics. Different levels of subscriptions will show different amounts of data within the reports.

Subscription Terms

Allowance Period

Allowance period is the period of time which your data usage, (as part of your subscription), is active. Allowance periods are usually monthly, starting on the date you initially took out your subscription. They can be reset if your subscription is still active.

Analysis Options

Analysis Options are a set of filtering options found within the advanced reports. When an advanced report is created, there are some filters in place automatically. You can edit/add filters by selecting "Analysis Options" at the top of an open report. There are 4 tabs of filters: Target, Source, Anchor Text and Flow Metrics.

For more information on the Analysis Options and how to use them, check out our "Power User Tips: Advanced Report Filtering" blog post.

Annual Subscription

These are subscriptions that are active for one year. This type of subscription is often prepaid. Please visit our plans and pricing page to purchase a subscription.

Index Item Units

These are fully explained in the API documentation and are not applicable to the web-only services.

Max. Analysable Backlinks

Each subscription plan has a cap on the total number of backlinks which can be reported or downloaded during a given period within your subscription. Usually it is a monthly period before the allowance refreshes. For instance, the Lite subscription lets you analyse a maximum of 5 million backlinks a month within the reports feature, (and by using the Raw Export option). This limit is in addition to the usage of Site Explorer, which does not affect your Analysable Backlinks allowance.

Retrieval Units

Retrieval units are fully explained in the API documentation and are not applicable to the web-only services.

Index Terms

Backlink

A backlink is an incoming link from a different website or referring domain. Within the SEO industry a "backlink" can sometimes be referred to as an "in link".

C-subnet / C block / Class C Subnet

In SEO terms, a "Class C subnet" refers to a class-c sized network, where the last octet; (number separated by dots), of the IPV4 address is ignored. So if there are three machines, one with IP 1.2.3.4, one with IP 1.2.3.5, and one with IP 1.2.4.1, an SEO expert may say that the machines are hosted on two Class-C subnets.

These terms have subtly different definitions in technical systems networking than in SEO, which can lead to confusion.

Fresh Index

The Fresh Index contains the most recent data crawled. Our Fresh Index is updated frequently throughout the day. The links within the Fresh Index tend to have a higher probability of being live than links found in the Historic Index as these links were visited most recently.

First Crawled

This is the date that the link was first located and indexed within the Fresh or Historic Indexes.

Please Note: There is a slight memory effect on some links, particularly within the Fresh Index. A "<" symbol before a date suggests that it is likely the link went live some time before the date shown. Older links in the Fresh Index will also appear in the Historic Index.

Historic Index

The Historic Index is the largest index of backlinks available on the web. This index spans back more than 5 years and is good for analysing the history of any given site or for reaffirming past relationships that are no longer live.

IP Address

Standing for Internet Protocol. The IP address is a number that is assigned to every computer or device which is active on the internet. This helps to identify different devices that are in use when accessing the internet. In IPV4; (the most common form of Internet addressing), this is normally shown in dotted form - 127.242.0.19.

Link Profile

A link profile is the website's profile made up from the websites' backlink data. On Majestic we present this as a scatter graph on a 101 x 101 grid. It is produced by drawing the Trust Flow and Citation Flow measures for individual Backlinks or Referring Domains linking to a site. Where several links have the same Trust Flow and Citation Flow, darker shades denote the density of this cell on the chart. This makes it possible to determine whether the link profile is healthy by how the dots are aligned/positioned on the graph.

Last Crawled

This is the date the page containing a given link was last crawled by our bot.

Linking Domains

Linking Domains is similar to that of a referring domain and refers to the number of unique source domains (e.g. example.com) linking to the target URL/domain.

Referring Domain

Referring domain, also known as "ref domain", is a website which has a backlink pointing to a page, or link, to the site you are analysing.

Referring IPs

A Referring IP refers to an IP address which hosts at least one website that contains a link to the given target URL or Domain. Many domains, (websites), can be hosted on one IP address. Use the Majestic Neighbourhood Checker tool to find out the IP address for any given domain.

Referring Subnet

This is an abbreviation for "Referring C-subnets".

In the Majestic system, multiple counts calculated links, de-duplicating links across pages; (which we refer to as backlink count), across domains; (the domain count), and across c-subnets. The C-subnet count is useful, as it is possible for the same class C-subnet to be used by one, or associated organisations. For larger sites, counting the unique linking relationships across C-subnets can also be useful.

Source Flags

Source flags are designed to differentiate between different types of links. The following source flags are currently in use:

Source Flag Description
Images Indicating that the link pointing to the site is an image.
NoFollow The link was marked as nofollow either via META tag or rel="nofollow" by the webmaster of the source site.
Frame Set if unique link was used in FRAME/IFRAME tags such as navigation bars.
Redirect Set if source URL redirected from one page to another; (usually via HTTP response codes 301, 302 or META Refresh based redirect), to the target location.
Deleted (or OldCrawl) If upon recrawl of the page it established the unique link originally found there in a previous crawl, is now deleted or lost.
AltText

Two cases:

  1. If anchor text is present: it was taken from alt/title attributes of an A tag.
  2. If anchor text is NOT present: target URL was found in normal text on the page - in essence it was mentioned there. Such mentions can present a good link building opportunity.
Alt text stands for alternative text and is a word or phrase that can be used to tell website viewers the nature or contents of an image link, similar to an Anchor Text.
Mentions Mentions are references to domain names or URLs that we find in plain text on the web. This can help when searching for places your site has been spoken about. This feature can be found within the Analysis Options in Advanced Reports.

Top Level Domain

Top Level Domain is the highest level of domains in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. It usually falls after the domain name and sometimes can relate to a country. For example .co.uk, .com, .au, .ca.

Top Backlinks

"Top Backlinks" are an attempt to list the most popular backlinks linking into the website you are analysing. Using the Flow Metrics, we can determine the importance of sites and pages.

Please note: Majestic reserve the right to enhance the metrics used to calculate page importance at any time.


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Fresh Index

Unique URLs crawled 486,830,100,180
Unique URLs found 1,109,786,063,916
Date range 17 Aug 2018 to 17 Dec 2018
Last updated 2 hours 13 minutes ago

Historic Index

Unique URLs crawled 1,873,305,791,381
Unique URLs found 7,970,591,192,219
Date range 21 Feb 2013 to 22 Sep 2018
Last updated 28 Oct 2018
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