It takes into consideration your internal links.

You should have a rough idea on the amount of backlinks you've created or at least know where the referrals are coming from if you have a lot of natural (viral) action. If Majestic is repeatedly reporting more than what could possibly be true then they probably have a problem with their spider/tracking software.

I just had a look at some of my domains and the counted links are stupidly high - when looking at the cumulative graph. If you compare this to the monthly discovery graph it appears they aren't removing lost links, or they are counting them more than once. The last months discovery value is about the same as what Yahoo is reporting in total.

I've always looked at backlinks as unit less numbers that are only understandable in context. That being said, if you take a look at your competitors Majestic backlinks you will find that they have millions as well.

I have figured out the relationship between the various backlink indicating sites and 'scores' they attribute to the backlinks. Needless to say, secrets...(I intended to end with witty quote indicating the value of secrets; however, I find that it's far to complex to sum up in a single sentence.)

Statistics and calculus

Hi Guys,

I am the marketing director at MajesticSEO and wanted to answer the original poster but also clear up some points in the thread.

>The only issue is that all the backlinks it counts are always ridiculously high!
I mean.. wow<

We do indeed report lots more links than most other systems - not least because we have a pretty large scale crawler. We also report at the page level.

If they are your own sites, then you can register (for free) validate your site and we will actually list every one of them for you, with date crawled, anchor text, whether it is still there, whether it is a redirect, strength of the incoming link etc. This isn't Yahoo's API - it's our own data.

One reason you may have lots of links in that headline number is that it is a cumulative counts of links found over 4 years crawling **INCLUDING LINKS NOW DELETE** This is really useful when analyzing competitors, because you can historically see paid link campaigns.

A second reason for large numbers may be if you use affiliate links direct to your site, this will create many links t the same pages, with multiple urls. Then again, this is also useful info, because you can dice the data to find a website's affiliates!

The third reason for inflated links is scrapers. usually those links are temporary and of low value - usually dead by the time you verify them - but these will mostly have a value (ACRank) of zero.

Now some other points from the thread:
>It takes into consideration your internal links.

No, this is not correct. We only count inbound links. However, we do treat sub-domains as different in some parts of our data set.

>If Majestic is repeatedly reporting more than what could possibly be true then they probably have a problem with their spider/tracking software.

We don't think so, however, older links may not have been checked since they were first seen, because our crawler never sees a need to go back there. We have recently made our crawler crawl more intelligently and have quite a long post about that on our blog (Dated 25th November).

> have figured out the relationship between the various backlink indicating sites and 'scores' they attribute to the backlinks. Needless to say, secrets...<

The scoring is far from secret. We give every URL a score from 0 to 15 based on the number of domains that link into the page.

>So to clarify: you're saying that whatever the reason, the quantities presented by Majestic can still be correct in a relative sense, albeit not a quantitative one?

The Anchor Index is a very big database (3,003,219,049,123 URLs from 307,174,759,713 crawled pages as of today). It contains URLs from all over the web with identified backlinks, anchor text and some metadata from pages that were crawled, analysed, indexed and finally merged into the index that can be queried.

We at MajesticSEO are really keen to have the largest and most usable anchor index on the web. We think we are a long way ahead of everyone except Google (certainly way bigger than Yahoo). That does mean that we scoop up all the link data - the good with the bad - but get a standard report and you can see the all the top links for yourself. You don't need to get an advanced report if you create sites which - for whatever reason - might create large amounts of links which are of limited value to analyze. That said - for your own sites, you can see them all for free anyway.

Hope that helps guys. Merry Christmas.

Dixon.