Our 'Historic Index' and 'Fresh Index' are huge databases which contain information about how sites on the Internet link together - effectively large repositories of Internet mapping data. Our tools then access these databases in order to generate reports which help people understand the flow of organic traffic to their own websites, and those of their competitors.

Our Historic Index is one of the most comprehensive sources of backlink data on the Internet. As such, despite our huge processing power, the index takes many days to build - ensuring that it is always a few days behind what is happening now. In order to address this, we have created a smaller, separate index which we call the 'Fresh Index'. As this index is smaller, we can update it more often, and thus it can be kept more up-to-date.

The two datasets - the 'Fresh Index' and the 'Historic Index' are separate, and it would take substantial effort to merge the two datasets seamlessly from a user perspective - which would have resulted in delaying the release of the Fresh Index by many months. The data from the Fresh Index will be fed into the Historic Index when the Historic Index is updated. There is therefore the possibility that older backlinks in the Fresh Index will also be present in the Historical Index.

The Historic index has 20,343,782,556,890 URLs from 4,177,206,178,435 crawled pages.

The Fresh index has 1,191,408,830,975 URLs from 445,661,949,516 crawled pages.

We report on our own limited copy of the world wide web ( our “link map” ). By focusing on a small amount of data from each page crawled ( links, page titles etc ) we can store huge amounts of data on commodity hardware.

In common with many web indexes, Our link map is ( and has been ) derived from two types of data source – data we crawl ourself and data imports from third parties, such as ( but not limited to ) Wikipedia ( https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ ) – this enables us to focus our crawl resources responsibly

This index is a big stepping stone towards relevant full-text search. The purpose of the index is to allow relevancy research as well as to help fund continued activites in development of a competitive community-driven general-purpose web-scale search engine.

Our Fresh Index and Historic Index are populated by crawl data produced by our web crawlers.

A web crawler cannot tell when a link was made, it only knows when it found it. Our Historic Index has the advantage of a history of data from when we started to crawl in 2006, which we believe makes it the most comprehensive source of backlinks information available.

Fresh and recent indexes have no knowledge of the internet before they started crawling. Our Fresh index forgets links that it has not seen recently. This can lead to the new tab rediscovering links, and wrongly including them in the data, a problem particularly acute for the oldest links in the Fresh Index. For a robust solution, consider generating an advanced historic report, and de-duplicating the data.

We believe all site explorers on the market suffer from some kind of memory effect when reporting link creation dates and hence new links.

Understanding SEO keywords is important in content design, paid online advertising and competitive positioning. Spotting opportunities of how your product can serve people asking questions like “best gift for boyfriend”, or “fix leaking tap” can go beyond tuning your site for SEO and impact your wider marketing strategy.

There are a variety of online tools, like answerthepublic.com and keywordsheeter.com that can provide questions people ask search engines – or to provide similar words or phrases to help you design content with an edge.

Majestic offers a number of complementary tools for keyword research based on the Majestic web map. Keyword Checker provides statistics on the popularity of SEO terms in URLs, title and anchor text – giving you a measure of how popular your target phrases could be on the web. Keyword Generator reports on words and phrases found around links to you and your competitor sites – focusing that insight on your immediate targets. The Majestic keyword Search Explorer gives you a search engine independent view of the competitive landscape for a given key phrase across the world wide web.

You can read more about the Majestic approach to keyword research with Sante Achille's guide to keyword generator.

Visit the plans and pricing page. Plans are available in US Dollars, Euros, and British Pounds.

Lite and Pro plans have a 7-day money-back guarantee for new customers purchasing their first ever Majestic Plan. To cancel your plan and qualify for a refund please contact support within 7 days of the start date of your plan.

It's really easy, just visit our Change Plan page to upgrade to an available plan that better suits your needs. For all upgrades, you will receive your higher plan allowances immediately.

You can upgrade your account at any time. When you complete your upgrade, you will get immediate access to your new account limits. You can upgrade easily on your Change Plan page.

If you choose Renewal Date as the start point of your plan alteration, your change and first payment will take place on your next renewal date.

In many instances, you will be able to change your plan today. Your first payment will go through immediately, and your next one will be due on the anniversary of today's date

Yes! If you are changing from a LITE or PRO plan to a higher powered plan, you will receive a credit for unused days before your next payment.

If you are upgrading from one of our API plans, you will receive a credit that reflects either the number of days left on account, or your remaining API units.

If you choose to move to a new plan today, you will have new allowances immediately.

Please keep in mind that any unused allowances are not carried over to your new account.

If choose to change at your Renewal Date, you can change your mind and cancel your request at any point before your new plan starts. It's really easy, just come back to this page and press a button.

If you change plan Today and later change your mind, you can schedule to go back to your original plan at your next renewal date.

The percentages in the Anchor Text pie chart on Site Explorer summary screen are calculated the following way:

• The total number of referring domains for the chart is calculated by adding the referring domains for top 1000 Anchor text.
• The number of referring domains with “empty Anchor Text” is subtracted from this total number.
• The number of referring domains for a particular anchor text is then divided by the total number of referring domains calculated above and multiplied by 100 to get the percentage. This is done for the top 10 Anchor texts.
• The "Other Anchor Text" percentage is calculated by subtracting the sum of Referring domains for top 10 Anchor texts from the total number of referring domains and multiplying it by 100 to get the percentage.