Published: June 7, 2010
Dixon Jones is the Marketing Director of Majestic12 LTD, owners of a web based technology used by the world's leading SEOs to analyze how web pages on the Internet connect between domains. It is the largest database of it's kind that can be analyzed publicly in this way, with well over a trillion back links indexed.
Dixon Jones is also a founding director of an Internet Marketing company and has a decade of experience marketing online, primarily above the line, building Receptional up from a start-up in my front room to a reasonable size. From near the start I did this with David to build a team of 15 Internet Marketing Consultants last time I counted and little sign of a slow down. The office has now become so tight that the landlord has agreed to build a considerable extension that would more than double our floor space. I don't think he wants us to leave.
Other of Dixon Jones accolades (or chains, depending on your point of view) in the world of Internet Marketing include being a moderator on Webmasterworld which most webmasters have heard of. If you haven't, I guess you are not a webmaster. To be fair, nor am I these days. I am an Internet marketer - but I don't know how an Internet marketer can really understand the nuances of the Internet Marketing world without at least some understanding of web-servers and CMS systems.
Interview Transcript
Eric Enge: One of the landmark deals of the industry in 2009 and 2010 was the search agreement between Microsoft/ Bing and Yahoo . I am sure one of the things that they consider to be a minor side effect was the announcement that this would result in Yahoo Site Explorer becoming obsolete. That leaves us with a situation where the SEO industry has lost its ability to analyze link structures and get access to link data, as links continue to play a huge role in rankings.
That means that other tools are required. I would say that Linkscape and Majestic-SEO are the two major contenders to benefit from everything has happened. Can you tell us anything regarding how you go about collecting your data?
Dixon Jones: Majestic-SEO was born out of an attempt to build a distributed search engine. By distributed I mean that instead of getting a massive data center the size of Google's to try and crawl everything on the web, what we did about four years ago to get people to contribute their unused CPU cycles to our crawling efforts. We have more than 1,000 now, that have downloaded a crawler on their PC. When they get spare bandwidth, the crawler is then crawling the web from their PCs and servers. We have been able to crawl incredibly quickly, but it took a couple of years to get the crawl right and optimized.
As we built it up, we started to crawl the web from hundreds of websites and machines every single day. We didn't try and collect all of the data about the Internet, because we realized early on just how much memory that would require. What we started d ...