Majestic SEO is often categorized as “all-in-one” tools – versatile like Moz Pro, SEMrush, Ahrefs. But this is a wrong assumption.
Majestic (or Majestic SEO) is a backlink SEO tool. With Majestic, you cannot search keyword difficulty, search volume monthly, check rankings, audit onpage or SEO techniques or data related to organic traffic and content.
If you want to know all the data related to SEO, you need to combine it with many other tools.
Majestic is just an additional tool, not a competitor to the “big guys” in SEO. Especially since Moz Pro and SEMrush are no longer strong in terms of backlinks but more in favor of other features.
Summary of Majestic reviews
What is Majestic?
Majestic is a website-based SEO tool that stores a huge amount of backlink data thanks to its long-standing operation since 2011. Majestic also introduces a backlink profile with many reports, images, analysis to help you guide the strategy. SEO strategy brings thousands of traffic.
We can’t say between Ahrefs and Majestic which is better, but both are the two most common names when it comes to backlinks.
There is another way to access Majestic’s backlink repository. Majestic works with Buzzsumo, a great content tool, and now includes Majestic backlink data.
Some features of Majestic SEO
Majestic features include:
- Backlink index data store from 2011 onwards.
- The crawler system is probably the largest (to get all those backlinks)
- Data include Citation flow (number of backlinks) and Trust Flow (quality of backlinks)
- Many tools to compare backlink and domain
- SEO extension (extension) for Chrome and Firefox browsers.
- Majestic Million: ranking top 1 million websites
- Many report options
- API (Application Programming Interface) – Intermediate method of connecting Majestic tools and applications
- Private search engine with a clear ranking factor
- Many link building tools and backlinks
Majestic performance statistics
Majestic features do not have:
- Traditional keyword metrics like monthly search volume, keyword suggestions and keyword difficulty
- Tracking ratings
- Proposal on SEO / audit techniques on-page SEO
- Content support tools
- Traffic data of organic search
Majestic has a metric called “Search volume” but this is not the same as “Keyword Volume.”
Unlike other tools, Majestic does not provide Keyword Volume.
The benefits of Majestic SEO to your business
The backlink information provided by Majestic can help your business in the following ways:
- Orienting SEO tactics to bring in more traffic from search engines.
- Monitoring the activities of the content
- Analyze opponents and self-assess based on your opponents
- Seek opportunities to collaborate or stay away from pages
See also: 25 great keyword ranking tools you should know!
The advantages of Majestic
- Backlink index is strong from 2011 onwards
- Many figures and images for backlink data analysis
- It is possible to search for Fresh Index (within 90 days) or full data in Historic Index
- Get information fast
- Handling large amounts of requests
- Topical Trust Flow delves into industry classification
Majestic has many great advantages
The disadvantages of Majestic
- Many SEO features are not available
- Many new features must use paid plans
- An outdated user interface results in an average experience
- Linked to Search Console but doesn’t seem to support anything more
- Not affiliated with Google Analytics
Who should use the tool?
Objects should and should not use Majestic
SEO professionals, agencies and anyone who spends most of their time on SEO. Majestic is maximized when combined with other SEO tools, serving the needs of advanced SEO.
If you are a business, blogger or marketer who uses a lot of SEO, then Majestic SEO is also essential. For example, if saying link building or PR outreach is a top issue, then backlink profile is the key to solve that problem.
But I think Majestic is not suitable for normal marketers or small businesses. People who spend a short time every week or month doing SEO do not need to use Majestic to get all the backlink profiles.
The term and interface are also unfriendly to users, especially those outside the industry or small businesses.
These objects are best used with all-in-one tools like Moz Pro, Ahrefs, or SEMrush. Moz and SEMrush do not have the same number of backlinks as Majestic, but it is enough to find the right sites for link building.
Ahrefs may be the same Majestic backlink testing tool, even better in some cases. Ahrefs also has many features and data on SEO.
In short, you do not need professional SEO tools to know the backlinks pointing to your page. You can use a free tool like Google Search Console.
How does Majestic work?
Begin
Majestic is easy to set up. First, sign up for a free or paid Majestic account. The free account is basically to see what the tool is like.
Once logged in, you can start using Majestic right away. Because Majestic is not an all-in-one SEO tool, it does not need much installation, nor does it have a keyword to test and competitors to put in like other tools.
This is a web-based application, so you do not need to download it.
You will want to verify the domain. Once verified, you can link to your Google Search Console account.
The verified domain will have advantages such as allowing more reports (and you also give Majestic the right to add your data to the index of this tool).
There are two ways to verify a domain: Add a meta tag or small txt file to your website.
Next: Browser toolbar.
You should install the Majestic extension on Chrome or Firefox.
This provides instant backlink information right in your browser, similar to the toolbars of other tools like MozBar, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, but mostly about backlinks.
7 The main part in Majestic
- Site Explorer
Site Explorer is the main interface in the Majestic SEO tool. Here you will get an overview of the most important data.
There are three main data shown before and right in the middle.
- Citation Flow: number of points of backlink (or citation)
- Trust Flow: backlink quality
- Topical Trust Flow: Influence of the page in the industry. For example, grocery store MAcy will have a higher topical trust flow in the retail industry than health.
These data are similar to Moz’s Domain Authority and Page Authority or SEMrush’s Domain and Trust score.
Topical Trust Flow uses a closed DMOZ classification system so it is unlikely to affect future data.
Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and Topical Trust Flow are the three main figures in Majestics
Next are the number of backlinks (external), referring domains, IPs and subnets (small groups of blocks of IPs).
Links in education or government are also shown separately. However, these backlinks are hard to find and strongly affect rankings.
Finally, there are backlink history, anchor text, follow vs nofollow links.
Statistic table of Majestic
- What is Referring domain?
Referring domain is the number of pages pointing to you. So, if you have 1001 backlinks, including 1 link from page 1 and 1000 links from page B, you only have 2 referring domains.
- What is Referring IP?
Referring to IP may be more useful than referring to a domain. Many domains go backlink from 1 IP. Meaning a page is the source of many other backlinks. This is not as reliable as the same number of links from independent sites.
- Differences between Fresh Index and Historic Index in Majestic SEO?
In Majestic, you will see two index options: Fresh index and Historic Index. If you only want recent links, use the Fresh Index, which links crawled within 90 days. If you want the link to take longer, use the Historic Index.
Most will default to the Fresh index.
- What is Majestic Topical Trust Flow?
Topical Trust Flow is an index of Majestic SEO that assesses the influence of a website in a specific field or topic based on the links of links pointing to any website. This data uses the huge taxonomy of Majestic into many areas. Topical Trust Flow scores range from 1-100.
Topical Trust Flow shows the topic of the website
PBN deindexing = Topical Trust Flow is not relevant
In the process of learning when using the Private Blog Network (PBN), as well as research of Gotch SEO, I discovered that:
One of the reasons PBN usage is deindex is when the content of the PBN and outbound links are not related to the Topical Trust Flow of that domain.
Suppose, the website javascripts-2.com (one of my dead pbn), has Topical trust flow as “computers’ ‘ but links to health sites then it is highly likely to be discovered by google and find the PBN.
Of course, google will not use Majestic to treat Topical Trust Flow, but it will use relevance as a way to get rid of your satellite system.
If your Private Blog Network is Health, you should write articles about PBNs related to health as well as linking out to the same topic pages to protect them.
- What is Majestic Trust Flow?
Majestic SEO Trust Flow is a measure of the credibility and credibility of a URL, determined by measuring the number of clicks on URLs from reputable sites to the required URL / domain.
Trust Flow is a scale given by Majestic
Why is Trust Flow important?
If you have been following me for a long time, you will know that I take Trust Flow very seriously, but I do not care much about DA (domain Authority), PA (page authority), DR (domain Rating), UR (Url) Rating) or PR (Page Rank).
Simply put, these indicators are easy to be manipulated by firing a series of backlinks to the website.
You just need to turn on GSA and hang 1 day, all shot on your website. I guarantee your website will increase the index quickly.
Look at my website GTV SEO will understand, gtvseo.com was shot by a “kind neighbor” GSA hanging all day. And now its UR has reached 80 already !!)
Trust Flow stands above all indicators
But saying that does not mean that these TF and CF indices cannot be manipulated!
In fact, there are many ways to manipulate it. One of those ways is blog commenting.
You can comment and place links on websites with high TF and you will be entitled to “part” of Trust Flow it.
But because TF speaks for the average quality of backlinks, relevancy is also calculated based on the amount of traffic that will click on that link to your website. So, it is hard to get the most out of the current Seo metrics.
In my experience, you can easily manipulate the Trust Flow index to 30, but the higher it gets, the harder it is. And I have never seen anyone who can manipulate Trust Flow> 45).
- What is Majestic Citation Flow?
Citation Flow is a scale of 1-100 to measure the impact of a URL based on the number of pages pointing to it. Link quality is also a deciding factor. You can see this is the link power of a website.
If Trust Flow assesses the quality of these links to give a specific score, Citation Flow tells you the evaluation score based on the number of links to the site. The more links, the more Citation Flow points will increase.
Citation Flow is a score based on the quality of links that go to a website
Everyone wants both TF and CF to be high. However, one problem that people often encounter is that the CF is very high, but the TF is almost no. This means a lot of backlinks but not quality.
This is not really good, because the Google Penguin algorithm values the link quality rather than its quantity. This can result in a ranking that is not as high as you want it to be.
Use Trust Flow and Citation Flow to analyze opponents
I did a very detailed post on using Trust Flow and Citation Flow to analyze and measure your opponent for making a reasonable SEO strategy. You can refer to the article: “Analyzing SEO competitors 2020”
Various backlink comparison tools
In Majestic SEO there are (too) many comparison tools, different interfaces but the data is the same. So, in this section we will go into all 4:
- Bulk Backlink Checker
- Compare Tool
- Link Profile Fight
- Campaigns
- Bulk Backlink Checker
Bulk backlink Checker is a useful but confusing tool. The full name should be Bulk Backlink Statistics Checker because this tool does not really provide backlinks but only backlinks for the page.
You can enter 400 URLs. After that, many backlink metrics will appear corresponding to those URLs. The Bulk backlink Checker also gives information like Trust Flow, Citation Flow, the number of backlinks and the number of referring domains.
It is also an ideal place to find information about topical trust flow for many sites at the same time.
Bulk Backlink Checker can check 400 URLs at the same time
In this section, you cannot get backlinks for link building.
To do so, there is a link for each URL to the Site Explorer section. Bulk Backlink Checker provides quick information but is simply a domain comparison tool.
- Compare Tool
Compare Tool can compare up to 10 domains at once. The data is almost identical to the bulk backlink checker, but in a different way. Compare Tool provides information in the form of diagrams to make it easier to compare pages.
Especially the highest point of each metric will be highlighted in the darkest color.
Compare Tool Diagram – the dark bar is the highest score
- Link Profile Fight
Link Profile Fight is another comparison tool. This tool provides diagrams for Citation Flow and Trust Flow. There is a separate diagram of each URL and a diagram of both.
The association diagram is easily misleading because one link profile often covers the other completely, making the bottom part look like there is no backlink.
For example, in the picture, Walgreen does not seem to have a link (but in fact, there are many areas covered with blue dots).
Link Profile Fight feature of Majestic
- Campaigns
This is new features, but they provide similar information in other ways.
Campaigns save the group of related URLs you want to analyze
In the campaign section of Majestic, you can enter multiple pages, usually in a specific field. In my example it is a retail store. And then you will get metrics like Citation or Trust Flow and backlinks as well as a few new figures illustrations.
Note that these Campaigns are not the same as Campaigns of other SEO tools. In other tools, Campaigns allows you to find insights for a page that you want to retrieve data (such as your site).
Backlink history
Next is Backlink History. This section displays a diagram of the number of new backlinks (and referring domains) over time between compared pages. The good thing is that you can analyze the backlinks that are gained every day or accumulated for a long time. You can also choose between Fresh Index and Historical Index.
Backlink gain over time (view by day)
The great advantage of Majestic that no tool has is the long-term index data store since 2011 to help measure content marketing and link building activities.
Clique Hunter
Clique hunter is one of the best features of Majestic, which shows which page is going backlink to the page you are analyzing (can analyze up to 10 domains at the same time), similar to the intersect link section of Moz Pro or Ahrefs.
For example, you enter Macys.com, Target.com and Walgreens.com, the page will only show pages that go to all 3 (or 2 options)
Clique hunter shows that incoming pages are pointing to the pages that you are analyzing
Clique hunter is a way to find effective link building opportunities. And because Majestic SEO has more backlinks than other tools, this feature will also be more comprehensive.
There are also many support options like sorting and filtering.
Majestic Million
Next, you can see how much your page ranks in Majestic Million. Majestic Million is a ranking of the top 1 million pages in the Majestic data store based on the referring subnet, simply put, the top 1 million pages on the web. If you delete all your pages, it will display the full Majestic Million list from the beginning.
Majestic Million is a top 1 million page list based on Majestic backlinks
Search Explorer
Search Explorer is Majestic’s own search engine.
Honestly, this will not replace Google in the future. The quality of search results is not as relevant as Google. In fact, Search Explorer only uses to compare how well Google is.
The biggest difference between Search Explorer vs Google is the transparency ranking factor. It seems to be a fairly simple algorithm, mostly based on backlinks and kw appears many times on the page as in the title and URL.
Search Explorer is Majestic’s own search engine
URL submitter
In this section you can add up to 100 links (Gold pack) crawled by the bugs of Majestic SEO.
Whether it is a competitor or a site that you are working with, you want the latest information. It can be said that this is the best SEO crawler to assist you effectively. If you need more than 100 then use additional credit.
Majestic also supports crawling up to 100 URLs
You can submit the URL to be crawled, thus helping the index faster.
Neighborhood Checker
Neighborhood Checker is a tool that indicates referring IPs of a backlink to any page. If multiple backlinks come from the same IP address (or subnet), these links will not be valid from multiple sources.
Moreover, this link building method is very suspicious if too many referring domains come from an IP or subnet. For example, a homeowner opens 10 domains on the same IP just to get backlinks to the main page from the remaining 9 pages. Neighborhood Checker will track this.
Neighborhood Checker is an advanced SEO tool
Keyword Checker
First, we need to understand that Keyword checkers cannot replace traditional tools (such as Moz’s Keyword Explorer). It does not include keyword-related standard metrics like monthly search volume or keyword difficulty.
This is completely different.
Instead it checks the number of times a kw (or phrase) appears on the Majestic index, while checking the kw in the URL, title and anchor text. For example, if you check the word “Melatonin”, the tool will tell you what was found in 2,095,980 URLs.
Majestic’s keyword checker is different from other tools
Keyword Checker is different from traditional kw tools, simply counting kw in Majestic’s index.
Now Majestic has the “Search volume” data, but this is not a monthly number. Not to be confused with the so-called “Keyword Volume.”
Majestic Search Volume is a number between 1-100, representing traffic from the search engine for kw per phrases. So, this tool is not about search volume but traffic from that kw.
Therefore, I recommend you to use another SEO keyword research tool besides Majestic.
Browser Extension
Majestic has extensions for both Firefox and Chrome (Majestic Backlink Analyzer). These extensions are similar to other tools like MozBar but lean backlink and link building, but do not provide any data related to on-page SEO.
Chrome Toolbar from Majestic
The Majestic SEO Toolbar displays the following information.
Free version:
- links to the URL
- links to the domain
- domain links to the URL
- domain links to the domain
- Citation Flow
- Trust Flow
- Link profile of citation flow and trust flow of all these links
- The graph depicts how the page timeline has been linked
Features for paid users:
- Top backlinks for each URL
- Automatically remove deleted backlinks
- Filter feature to select top backlink from top referring domain
- Topical Trust Flow and Majestic backlink key for all backlinks
- Summary of top anchor text for each URL
- Topical Trust Flow for Anchor Text
- Export the URL to your Majestic
- Lead to Majestic SEO Site Explorer for any backlink
Buzzsumo option
As mentioned above, Majestic SEO specializes in backlinks. Actually, there is now another way to access Majestic’s massive data warehouse. In November 2016, Majestic partnered with Buzzsumo and now Buzzsumo has included Majestic backlink data into their products.
Majestic has been integrated with Buzzsumo
If you have a Buzzsumo premium account, we can also view Majestic backlink data.
This is a great collaboration to create the perfect link building tool.
I am also pretty sure Serpstat uses Majestic metrics for all backlinks.
Availability: UX and UI
It is clear that Majestic’s UI (user interface) is not very attractive and very outdated. Overall design is monotonous, if not bad.
Artwork page design
Majestic has most of the data that SEO analysis tools today have. But the design element reduces user experience (UX).
Sometimes a number of links lead me to another unwanted part. Majestic’s layout may be better if the screen and parts are more uniform.
And a new design will make the Majestic user experience much more interesting, thereby improving the brand.
Majestic SEO pricing and packages: How much does Majestic cost?
Currently Majestic has two pricing packages. I will focus on the new package because it is very likely that these packages will only be available in the future. Previously, Majestic’s “Legacy” package limited data, not feature.
Majestic’s new pricing plan has limited data and features, so it is more disadvantageous especially the “Lite” package does not include the Historic Index. So, you can only get links within 3 months. There are also many features not included in this price range, including clique hunter, custom report, backlink history, and email alert.
Majestic’s “Gold” package drops to $ 149 but now has only 1 user, instead of 5 as before.
Following is the new pricing package:
Different new packages updated in March 2016
Legacy pricing package:
Majestic’s legacy package is still available
Is there a free trial or package?
- There is no trial package
- You can preview some (limited) features and tools with a free account but Majestic does not have a free plan.
Majestic vs. other tools
Most people think Majestic SEO’s competitors are Moz Pro, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Serpstat. But I do not think so because these tools support each other.
Integrate
Majestic’s Open App API allows linking with other tools including:
- SEO tool for excel
- Google Search Console
- Google docs (Google sheets)
- Firefox and Chrome browsers
- Advanced Web Ranking
- Buzzstream
- Remove ‘em
- Rank Ranger
Conclusion
Majestic SEO is a backlink-intensive tool and its backlink index is also the most comprehensive data warehouse of all SEO tools.
Although Majestic is not an “all-in-one” SEO tool, you can completely overcome it by combining other tools and in return, you get extremely quality data.
SEO tools provide data only after all. And fortunately, Majestic has tons of backlink data as well as showing this data in various ways for analysis. If you are a SEO professional and need a full backlink profile, Majestic is a great tool to have.
Hope you enjoyed the Majestic SEO review. Please share your comments below the comments.