WebProNews

Linkscape, the link data analysis tool from SEOmoz, has rolled out an update to its index. The company has shared some data and statistics from it, and that includes some interesting stats on nofollow use.

First, if you are unfamiliar with Linkscape, watch this WebProNews interview with SEOmoz's Rand Fishkin from when it was first announced. This will give you an idea of what Linkscape is all about.

Now, on with those stats. The latest update includes:

- 53 billion urls (Linkscape's biggest index to date)

- 500 billion links

- Everything crawled within the last two months

- Linkscape crawled every blog post pulled from Blogscape up until May 1

- Linkscape is now counting # of Root Domains linking to a Subdomain instead of Subdomains linking to a Subdomain

And now for those nofollow stats:

- nearly 15 billion links (~3% of all links) are using the nofollow attribute

- over 11 billion of those were internal (73% of instances of nofollow)

These stats are particulary interesting, considering all of the nofollow talk as a result of the Matt Cutts Q&A session at SMX Advanced recently. Mike McDonald addressed that in a recent article.

"I don't pretend to know what motivates these internal usage of nofollow, but this is certainly consistent with the hypothesis that nofollow is used extensively for internal architecture reasons," says Nick Gerner on the SEOmoz Blog. "We're looking into this issue a great deal."

Gerner also notes that the Linkscape team is also keeping a close eye on adoption of the canonical link attribute. He says adoption is low, but growing. 

As for the current Linkscape update, more visualization has been added. This comes from the Linkscape Visualization Tool, which shows data using radar graphs, and lets you compare sites using elements like external link count, domains linking, domain mozRank, eternal mozRank, and mozTrust. Also included is the raw data in table form.

They even take the data another step further by offering suggestions for next steps:

It looks like a pretty interesting way to further analyze your site, and use the data and advice you obtain to improve its overall performance. Having another weapon in your arsenal will always help you stay on top of the game. What do you think about the new additions to Linkscape? Share your thoughts.