So, nearly ten years now, did you ever envision Majestic to have such a large role in the SEO industry?

So very nearly 10 years… October in fact! I only teamed up with Alex [Majestic’s MD] after he had already seen the light.

At the start, I suspect Alex didn’t actually realise there was an SEO industry! He was just trying to build a distributed search engine.

However, when he hit a problem trying to retrieve results fast over a distributed network, he understood that he would need to centralise the data.

This gave rise to immense bandwidth and storage questions, which is why the original efforts quickly started to focus on links. That was when I got interested in what Alex was doing.

He was still operating from his bedroom at the time. He is the brains of the outfit – I just knew everyone in the SEO industry that needed to get their hands on this data as fast as possible.

Did Penguin accelerate the use of Majestic SEO? Did the company have to make changes to facilitate the demand?

Not quite as quickly as Yahoo cancelling Site Explorer did!

Because we give a users’ own link list for free, penguin had the effect of dramatically increasing our free user base and also our brand recognition – but the money comes in the insight we can add beyond the raw link list I think.

Now we have Topical Trust Flow, which is not free, I think we have a much stronger paid offering for Penguin users.

What is the ratio between private individuals and agencies using Majestic?

No idea. We only ask for an email address and even company users seem to use weird addresses. I would SAY we are all B2B though.

What was the logic behind your recent Topical Trust Flow development?

We employed a researcher for a year trying to create categorisation.

Unfortunately, we gave him an impossible task and it was only when we really looked at why we were not making headway that we saw another approach that we thought would work well.

When Alex started working on that in earnest, all hell broke loose in the company.

We delayed other route maps, diverted engineering and design resources, and then really got it all out in the space of a few months – (after years of trying). I was immediately enamoured with the initial results, because it takes our offering way beyond SEO applications.

How does Majestic gauge the topic of a website?

Groups tend to stick together into clusters… in real life and on the web.

If we know 10 sites that are all about (say) accountancy, and they are at the top of their profession, then they will be more likely to link to content about accounting.

If one of them links to a spurious site about horses, the others are unlikely to follow suit, so the breadcrumb trail dries up quickly, but if one is linking to the trade association, then probably several are, increasing the Trade Association’s relevance in Accounting.

By taking known associations and topics and then extrapolating this information, we use what I call a “decay algorithm” to create vectors between topics and pages.

How quickly does Majestic index a link once it has gone live?

That depends. First we have to find it. If it is submitted to our URL submitter or (more likely) is itself linked from the home page of a reputable website, that should not be difficult.

On the whole we’ll find the link the day it goes live. However – and this is a big but – it takes a day or more to do the maths on Trust Flow and update all the calculations, so you are unlikely to see a link live for at least 24 and more likely 48 hours after it goes live.

If a link is deep on a new page, then we are much more likely to see the PAGE and get that updated quickly than the links on the page.

This is because seeing a new URL is different to crawling a new URL. If the new page itself is poor quality… well we are less inclined to rush to crawl it, so until we do, the LINK on the page will not get seen by us.

How much has the disavow process changed the role of backlink crawlers?

It has not changed our crawl process one iota. I imagine it has changed Google’s though!

Have you ever thought about, or will there ever be a Majestic SEO mobile or tablet App?

Yep. Actually, we already have the APIs publicly available for anyone that wants to jump in there using our OpenApps technology.

I’ll be using the same approach if and when we build something dedicated.

The only concern for us is that our developers should be concentrating on the core data. Anyone can build an app… crawling and indexing 3 trillion pages is a little harder.

We like to focus on the hard stuff