How to Download a Moz Link Analysis to Excel

Getting your hands on raw backlink data is the first step to a powerful SEO strategy, and Moz's Link Explorer is a fantastic tool for gathering it. But to truly unlock its potential, you need to get that data out of their interface and into a spreadsheet where you can slice, dice, and analyze it. This guide will walk you through the simple process of exporting a Moz link analysis to a CSV file and give you some practical tips for what to do with it once you have it in Excel.

Why Export Moz Data to Excel in the First Place?

You might be wondering why you'd go through the trouble of exporting data when Moz provides its own dashboard and filters. The reality is that the real magic happens when you can manipulate the data on your own terms. Exporting to a tool like Excel or Google Sheets gives you complete freedom.

• Deeper, Custom Analysis: Create pivot tables to group links by Domain Authority, analyze anchor text distribution by page, or identify which countries are linking to you most often.
• Merge with Other Data Sources: Combine your Moz backlink data with traffic data from Google Analytics, ranking data from another SEO tool, or even conversion data from your CRM. This gives you a complete picture of a link's true value.
• Custom Dashboards and Visualizations: Build charts and graphs to visualize your link profile’s health over time, making it easier to spot trends and present your findings to your team or clients.
• Historical Archiving: Saving your exports allows you to build a historical record of your backlink profile. This is invaluable for tracking progress, diagnosing issues after an algorithm update, or analyzing competitor velocity over time.

Step-by-Step: How to Download Your Moz Link Analysis

Fortunately, Moz makes this process incredibly straightforward. A few clicks and you’ll have a CSV file ready for action. Follow these simple steps.

1. Log In and Navigate to Link Explorer

First things first, log into your Moz Pro account. From the main dashboard, find the "Campaigns" section or look for the drop-down menu of Pro tools. Select Link Explorer to get started.

2. Enter Your Target Domain, Subdomain, or URL

In the main search bar of the Link Explorer tool, type or paste the URL you want to analyze. You have a few options here:

• Root Domain: (e.g., yourwebsite.com) - This will analyze the entire website, including all subdomains. This is best for a complete overview.
• Subdomain: (e.g., blog.yourwebsite.com) - Use this if you want to analyze a specific section of your site, like your blog.
• Exact Page: (e.g., yourwebsite.com/your-awesome-post) - Perfect for analyzing the link profile of a single piece of content.

Once you’ve entered your target, click the "Analyze" button.

3. Choose the Specific Link Report You Need

After Moz analyzes the URL, you aren't limited to just one report. The left-hand menu provides several different views of the link data. Before you export, make sure you're in the report that contains the information you actually need. Common choices include:

• Inbound Links: This is the most popular report. It gives you a detailed, link-by-link list of every backlink pointing to your target URL. Each row represents a single backlink.
• Linking Domains: Instead of showing every link, this report provides a list of every unique domain linking to you. This is great for getting a sense of the diversity and authority of your overall link profile.
• Top Pages: This report shows you which pages on your site have the most backlinks or the highest Page Authority. It's incredibly useful for identifying your most valuable content assets.
• Anchor Text: See a summary of the most common anchor text used in your backlinks. This report helps you understand how other sites are referencing and categorizing your content.

4. Apply Filters to Refine Your Data (Pro Tip!)

Before you hit the export button, take a moment to use Moz’s built-in filters. This can save you a ton of time cleaning up your spreadsheet later. Just above the data table in most reports, you'll see options to filter by metrics like:

• Link Type (Follow, Nofollow, Redirect, etc.)
• Spam Score (e.g., show only links with a Spam Score of 1-30%)
• Domain Authority (DA) or Page Authority (PA)

For example, if you're only interested in high-quality, "follow" links, you can apply those filters first. Your export will then only contain the data you care about, making your work in Excel much cleaner from the start.

5. Locate and Click the "Export CSV" Button

Once you’re in the correct report and have applied any desired filters, look for the Export CSV button. It’s typically located in the top-right corner of the data table, often represented by a download icon.

Click it. Moz will generate your report and the file will automatically download to your computer’s default downloads folder.

That's it! You've successfully downloaded your link analysis.

Opening and Cleaning Your Moz Data in Excel

Now that you have the CSV file, it's time to make it usable. Double-clicking the file should open it in Excel, but sometimes CSVs can look a bit messy at first.

1. Launch with "Text Import Wizard" if Needed

If your data opens and is all crammed into a single column, don't panic. Excel's "Text Import Wizard" can fix this. Go to the Data tab, click "From Text/CSV", select your file, and ensure the delimiter is set to "Comma". This will correctly separate the data into distinct columns.

2. Format as a Table

This is the single best thing you can do to make your data manageable. Click anywhere inside your data set and press Ctrl+T (on Windows) or Cmd+T (on Mac). Confirm that your data has headers. This accomplishes a few key things:

• It makes the data much easier to read with alternating row colors.
• It automatically adds filter and sort drop-down menus to each column header.
• It makes writing formulas and creating pivot tables much simpler.

3. Understand the Key Columns

A Moz export can contain dozens of columns, many of which are only useful for very technical analysis. For most users, these are the columns to focus on:

• URL: The exact page that is linking to you.
• Anchor Text: The clickable text of the link.
• Link Target: The URL on your site that the link is pointing to.
• Page Authority (PA): Moz's score (from 1-100) that predicts how well a specific page will rank.
• Domain Authority (DA): Moz's score (from 1-100) for the linking domain's overall ranking strength.
• Spam Score: A percentage estimating the likelihood that a site is spammy. Small numbers are good, large numbers are bad.
• Link Type: Tells you if the link is a "Follow" or "Nofollow" link.

You can hide or delete columns you don't need to simplify your view.

3 Practical Analyses to Run on Your Moz Export

With your data clean and organized in an Excel table, you can now start pulling out valuable insights. Here are a few easy ideas to get you started.

1. Find Your Highest-Authority Links

You can quickly identify your most powerful backlinks by sorting the data.

• Click the filter arrow on the Domain Authority (DA) column header.
• Select "Sort Largest to Smallest".
• Now you can see the most authoritative domains that link to you right at the top. Are these the relationships you imagined? Are there opportunities to get more links from similar domains?

Pro Tip: Take this further by creating a PivotTable. You can group links into DA buckets (e.g., DA 1-10, DA 11-20, etc.) to see how your overall link profile is distributed.

2. Analyze Your Anchor Text Distribution

Your anchor text profile sends strong signals to Google about what your content is about. An unnatural profile can be a red flag.

• Sort by the Target URL column to group all links pointing to the same page together.
• Now, look at the distribution of the Anchor Text column for each page. Is it mostly your brand name? Is it over-optimized with exact-match keywords? Or is there a healthy, natural mix?

3. Identify Potentially Harmful Links

Cleaning up harmful backlinks can be just as crucial as building new ones.

• Click the filter arrow on the Spam Score column header.
• Select "Sort Largest to Smallest".
• This brings all the links from potentially spammy websites to the top. While a high spam score isn't a guaranteed penalty, links with a score above 50% or 60% are worth manually reviewing. If they look low-quality, they might be candidates for a disavow file.

Final Thoughts

Exporting your Moz analysis to Excel unlocks a level of flexibility and analytical power that you simply can't get inside a web-based tool. By following these steps, you can move from simply looking at your data to truly understanding it, allowing you to build a more deliberate and effective SEO strategy.

While mastering this manual download-and-analyze process is a huge step forward, you might find that the routine of downloading CSVs, cleaning spreadsheets, and building the same reports week after week becomes a chore. At Graphed, we built our tool to eliminate that friction by connecting directly to your data sources. So instead of wrestling with spreadsheets, you can use natural language to create real-time dashboards and get instant insights from all your marketing and sales data in one place.