News Courtesy of Moz.com:
Earlier this week we launched our brand-new link building tool, and we're happy to say that Link Explorer addresses and improves upon a lot of the big problems that have plagued our legacy link tool, Open Site Explorer. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand transparently lists out many of the biggest complaints we've heard about OSE over the years and explains the vast improvements Link Explorer provides, from DA scores updated daily to historic link data to a huge index of almost five trillion URLs.
Ryan’s Take 
I’ve recently ramped up my efforts for link building and exploring opportunities. The best way i’ve found to get these opportunities is to research the competition. I like to see where they are getting their high authority links from. One of my favorite free tools for exploring backlinks on a domain is located here. It’s free with no signup required. You get only the top 100 links on a domain, but that is more than enough to start link building for your target website.
Having tried Moz’s previous backlink explorer, Open Site Explorer, I was left unimpressed. A lot of times there would be no data for a domain where other tools would show plenty of backlinks. At this moment, I just signed up for a free Moz account in order to try their new link explorer. I quickly put it to the test and compared to OSE.
The site I tested had no data available for OSE. Their new tool? 3.5K inbound links on 291 domains. Quite a difference! You only get the top 50 DA backlinks on a free account with 10 monthly search queries. Honestly, I don’t think that is a bad deal at all. You can export these links to a CSV file for researching later too.
Spam score metric gets an overhaul
Another nice feature is their new and improved spam score metric. Reported backlinks have a spam score percentage from 0 to 100%. It might be tempting to go after a high DA/PA backlink opportunity, but when you see a high spam score percentage you should stay away. It definitely will be something I factor into my link building process from here on out.
Overall, I’m quite impressed with the beta of this tool. 10 queries a month is a decent amount to whet your appetite. It’s worth it to sign up for the free account at the very least. If you’re serious about link building, why not give it a spin? I have a feeling you won’t be disappointed.
