The Majestic Backlink Indexes

Backlink Indexes are specialised databases that serve SEOs and digital marketers. A backlink index is the result of mapping the web's link structure. The map is created and maintained by software called web crawlers.

Digital Marketing professionals use backlink indexes to:

• Inform link building strategies. Outreach, advertising and digital PR are essential to add signposts to your site around the internet. If no-one knows your site exists, how do you aim to gain visitors?
• Detect onsite issues, such as missing pages, or 404s. If your website is linked to from an authoritative source, missing content can result in the loss of highly qualified traffic.
• Report on Digital PR activity. Winning on-brand messaging is difficult. Backlink Indexes help you identify links to your brands site. For more significant campaigns, you can go further and report on links to articles and discussions about your campaign. Capturing n-tier links helps you help your client understand the results of your effort.
• Monitor online brand presence and threats. Find typo domains and brand domains under novel new TLD's. Supporting your efforts in monitoring threats to brand such as reputation and phishing.

The web of connections between pages and websites provides a range of insight. As one of the earliest operators of a backlink index, Majestic offer not one, but two databases of backlinks. Gain the benefit of historic insight and up-to-date contemporary analysis.

A backlinks index helps understand how a webpage is perceived in the broader internet ecosystem, influencing its authority, relevance, and, ultimately, its search engine ranking. By leveraging the data available in our backlink indexes, professionals can identify potential link-building opportunities and check backlink profiles.

Two Indexes, both with mind-blowing numbers

Our Fresh Index is the up-to-date list of all the backlinks we've seen in the past 120 days. Crucially, it also includes deleted and lost links from that period.

The Historic Index is a huge backlink database. With records dating back to 2006, you can investigate link growth patterns and surface past anomalies like never before.

The Fresh Index

Your default view, the Fresh Index, is for those who need an accurate and up-to-date backlink checker. Offering the broadest picture of the live web, the Fresh Index provides you an accurate and contemporary dataset of the latest new or lost backlinks.

Fresh Index data is typically used by SEOs, digital marketers, and web agencies to monitor PR and link building campaigns, benchmark SEO performance, and detect the presence of unusual backlinks.

The Fresh Index only reports on links and websites where it has seen a link to that URL in the past 120 days. If we haven’t seen a link to a website in the past four months, we decide that it is irrelevant, and remove it from the index.

Link churn can also be a real threat, so the Fresh Index does not discriminate against link status. As long as we have seen a link in the past 120 days, even if it is later deleted, returns an error, or presents a 404 Not Found response, then we will show it in the Fresh Index.

534,390,895,773

Unique URLs found

19 May 2026 to 16 Sep 2026

Date range

Last updated 1 hour 22 minutes ago

The Historic Index

Our Historic Index is a behemoth. In fact, it is so big that it's usually ignored as the elephant in the room in backlink comparison articles. The Historic Index is a long-term archive of the relationships between URLs. In much the same way as you may find yourself digging around the Internet Archive, the Historic Index is a map of what the web used to look like.

It is designed as a complete repository of all the backlinks we have discovered since 2006. Access to this information is critical to professionals like forensic SEOs, link auditors, researchers, academics, journalists, and domain name traders.

21,743,308,221,308

Unique URLs found

06 Jun 2006 to 26 Mar 2024

Date range

Last updated 03 May 2024

Why Two Indexes? Why Not Have One Big Index?

In a perfect world, the web would be an orderly media with a general index and simple and intuitive paths to identify all resources. In this scenario, the web would have an API that enabled developers to build easy-to-use backlink checkers. The backlink checkers would always reflect an accurate snapshot of the whole web. In reality, the web is a decentralised entity with no API; therefore, there is nowhere to plug in an API. Because of this, companies make backlink indexes.

When our crawlers return with their latest packets of raw data, that information needs to be cleaned, separated, and integrated into our previous index. Then, we need to recalculate all metrics across the index and prepare the data for display. We then calculate our quality metrics: Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Trust Flow, like Page Rank, is a proprietary metric calculated at page level. This is also done for each of our Topical Trust Flow categories.

While having one index would make things easier for our marketing team, a single index requires a considerable amount of time to be built: weeks or months rather than hours or days. Reducing this timeframe would require an insane amount of investment with a direct impact on our [incredibly competitive prices](/content/plans-pricing "Get Started with Majestic - Plans and Pricing."/index.html). There is also a very practical consideration: Most customers need day-to-day fresh data, so this investment would provide no benefit. It would make no sense to provide fresh data every two weeks or so.

In theory, we could cut corners on our index builds. Perhaps we could make the Trust Flow calculation only have one iteration… but that would reduce its accuracy. Or we could stop pre-preparing the data and do it on demand… but that would make our customers endure load times when they visit a screen. These aren’t options that we wanted to take, therefore, a single index is impractical and costly.

Unparalleled Backlink Insights, Powered by The Most Advanced Web Crawling Technologies.

Subscribe now to unlock the full potential of our Fresh and Historic Backlink Indexes, transform your approach to digital marketing with data-driven insights that are always fresh and up-to-date.

The Fresh Index is available to all subscribers.

The Historic Index is available on PRO plans and above.