In the future, I think we’ll try to add some sort of notice like “may be penalized” or “may not pass PageRank” – that kind of thing based on the comparison (or based on our own spam/paid link analysis).

No doubt Linkscape offers SEOs the best information on links we’ve ever had. It’s an invaluable addition to my own tool set – and I’m sure it will be for anyone who tries it. Still, this issue was stuck in my craw since I noticed it – mozRank is potentially a solid metric, but “actionable” in my definition has to be tied to how Google and the other search engines actually value links – and in the example above there’s clearly a disconnect.

If nothing else, I wanted to make the case that while Linkscape is a great tool for competitive link research, we still need to cautiously inspect the other signals involved before we take action.

If there’s any specific things you’d like to see from the tool, don’t hesitate to ping us. We’ve got a ton of feature requests and enhancements we’re working on, but with this much data to draw from, there’s bound to be hundreds if not thousands of great ideas for how we can improve. You can email me personally – rand at seomoz dot org or shoot it to sitesupport at seomoz dot org and the dev team will put it in their pipeline.

I do think that the way mozRank is calculated and displayed doesn’t account for this very important factor. One major link from a site that has been penalized or banned by Google can throw mozRank off by a large degree. That means you’ve got to do a lot more homework on links and where they’re coming from than what Linkscape has to offer, and I think this point renders mozRank as quite a diminished metric from what we might have hoped it would be.

Still, I will continue to use and appreciate Linkscape from here on out. It still offers a better picture of links on the web than search engines do. But I think we need to take it, and especially mozRank, with a great big grain of salt.