Battle of the SEO Tools

[Rhys1234567890]

Moz? Ahrefs?
Which is your favourite and why? Which would you argue is more accurate?

Mods Note: We normally don't allow mentioning specific SEO tools because of spam/self-promotion issues but we are going to make an exception in this particular thread. When sharing your input remember to be fair and mention the good & bad aspects of the SEO tool. If we suspect spam or self-promotional posting we are going to err on the side of caution and delete first. Thanks!

[edited by: goodroi at 4:08 pm (utc) on Mar 15, 2017]

[Rhys1234567890]

Sorry! I was just looking for general advice. Thank you for allowing it!

[londrum]

you can't ask useful questions like that on webmasterworld -- you'll get told off.

i have used moz and ahrefs in the past, and i thought the stats for moz were always a bit out compared to the other ones. ahrefs was much more in depth

[Rhys1234567890]

I've always used Moz, but I'm increasingly hearing that ahrefs is better for giving more in-depth analysis (better indication of ranking/backlink profile etc).

I use Moz Pro and I like the keyword tracker, insights and page optimisation advice, but am a bit worried about how wide-of-the-mark it is in terms of ranking, link profile etc.

[topr8]

>>(better indication of ranking/backlink profile etc).

personally i block the ahrefs bot, and i'm sure i'm not the only one, so i'm not sure about the integrity of their backlinks profiles.

[brotherhood of LAN]

>useful
heh

Indeed, these tools are pretty fundamental to understanding link profiles. I'd put Moz in a distant third. Apparently, ahrefs is the most aggressive crawler at the moment. I do prefer Majestic, mainly for it's GetIndexItemInfo and GetBackLinkData API calls. The former is good for a summary of a bunch of domains in telling how powerful they are, on face value. The latter is good for evaluating individual backlinks.

All of them have their limitations, and in some niches bot blocking will not give you a true representation of what Google sees as a backlink profile. Always worth mentioning that for each, they're merely a snapshot of the web that they saw at a particular moment in time. Their headline metrics can also be misleading. You'll get people going on about trust scores, DA or PA, which are useful metrics but can easily be gamed and shouldn't be taken on face value alone.

Along those lines, Majestic just produced a blog post about how these kind of link tools need to be smart about how they spider the web, by avoiding bot traps and thinking about crawling budgets and priority. It's worth a read: [blog.majestic.com...]

[Pjman]

Ahrefs kicks the crap out of Moz, if you are link building or in charge of outreach.

It's so much more streamlined.