Why is open site explorer not showing the top links that if found previously.
-
In previous months ago open site explorer listed many other sites linking to mine. I have checked those sites and they are still linking to my site. Why doesn't open site explorer list them?
-
I got this reply from help@seomoz.org:
Your request (#41376) has been answered! See the comment history below. If you're not quite done with this ticket yet and want to add a comment, please reply to this email and the ticket will open back up.
If you wrote us using an SEOmoz account email, you can also view your ticket here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/tickets/41376
Aaron Wheeler, Oct-27 14:03 (PDT):
Hey Tom,
Thanks for reaching out about this, and I'm sorry you're not seeing your links in OSE. It sounds pretty frustrating, and totally understandably so. As you know, we have made some updates to our crawling for Linkscape - sadly, with a few hiccups. This is the first quarte including the new metrics, which is why you're suddenly seeing the changes. Our new crawler is built to be fresher, but it is going deeper into domains, and, unfortunately, not visiting as many domains. This is probably why links from those domains aren't getting indexed. Domains with a high mozRank are getting crawled deeper, but domains with middle to lower mozRanks are not getting crawled. Our top priority now is to get the domain diversity back up to or better than that of our last quarter updates (as was originally designed) so that we should have many more inbound links. If you're interested, here's a link to the blog post about the update's metrics (it sounds like you may have read this): http://www.seomoz.org/q/link-analysis (scroll down to Kate's answer).
Also, just to be completely transparent about the update, you may see “questionable” links with weird file extensions - this is due to the crawler reaching much deeper into sites where there are more download links. We are looking into fixing this bug as soon as we can so these won’t be counted as links.
I hope this helps explain the changes. We are so sorry about the inconvenience and are focusing our efforts right now on getting this fixed! I wish there was more I could do for you personally, but at the moment, it's a matter of waiting for the index to expand. I've closed this ticket for now, but please let me know if you have any questions or if there's anything else I can do to help and the ticket will open right back up.
Have a great day,
Aaron--
Aaron Wheeler
SEOmoz Help Team
http://www.seomoz.org/team/aaron -
I've found the anchor text distribution not to be correct. It has stayed static on the last update mostly even though i have gotten rid of site-wide links.
I'll wait to see if the next update corrects it all.
-
Let me first share everyone, including myself and the SEOmoz team is unhappy with the tool's current performance. The information I am sharing is not designed to excuse anything but more so to share my understanding.
I found your link on the following page: http://www.business.com/general/carpet-cleaning-services/. The page shows a DA of 82 but a PA of 1. The PA of 1 indicates OSE is not seeing any links to the page which is not good.
The next area I took a look at is the site's internal linking. If I am on the home page of Business.com and I wish to find your listing in the way the crawler would (i.e. by following links) how would I do it? There is not a "general" category on the home page.
The only way I could navigate to your page is as follows:
-
Business.com home page select "Browse All Categories".
-
Scroll to the bottom of the categories page which has 370 links and select "C" from the Browse More Listings alphabetical selector
-
Select "Carpet Cleaning Services"
It's true your page is within 3 clicks of the home page, but it's a rough way to go. You could submit this example to the help team help@seomoz.org. They could perhaps offer more details about this particular link. I have seen pages on Yahoo Directory and DMOZ where even Google does not pick up the link.
-
-
These top links that were found in OSE before had been found for over a year after every crawl. Since July they have disappeared. I don't know why it wouldn't crawl Business.com.
-
why doesn't it remember the top links from before and check to see if they are still linking?
To the best of my knowledge, the Linkscape crawler begins with a clean slate each crawl. The database is emptied and the crawler is instructed to go out and crawl the top 25% of web pages. If you have links from quality sources such as the New York Times, Apple, Pepsi, SEOmoz, etc. then your links should be seen each time. If your links are from pages which are highly questionable, those pages may bounce in and out of the crawls at times for various reasons.
One example, a questionable site which is not crawled deeply ads a new article to their site. The article appears on the site's home page in the "new articles" block. That month the article is crawled because it is linked from the home page. Thereafter the article no longer appears with a link from the home page, the site is not crawled deep enough to find the article naturally, so the link is no longer visible. That is one common scenario which can occur.
-
Keri,
I know I have to change the content on a lot of the city pages. There are so many that I hadn't got around to them all. Creating new content for all those cities isn't easy.
Partners.html and Gotlinks.php are my links pages. Don't have much control on Gotlinks. Partners creates a 2nd page once it reaches more than 15 links and the title is then duplicated which I have no control. /lose_weight_fast I created myself which I do control to give myself links.
I see what you mean about keyword stuffing the URL's of the city pages but so far it has helped in Google except for Arlington_Virginia so I will probably shorten some of these and add it in my .htaccess file.
As far as the /blog well, all I get in my comments are spam so I did okay a few of these to let Google see some bloggers were interested in my site.
Thanks for pointing all these out. I will take care of most of it but the third party links mangers are a bit more challenging.
-
I'm still waiting on OSE to download the whole list to see if they are on there. First, be sure that you're looking at links that go to your entire root domain and not just to the home page. Second, not all of those are the best sites. The Wedding planning directory has hundreds of links, including links to adult incontinence products. That's not the top 25% of the web that OSE aims to index.
On a side note, are you aware of all of the pages on your site and spammy comments?
http://astrobrite.net/blog/?attachment_id=16&cpage=2#comment-51834
http://www.astrobrite.net/partners.html
http://www.astrobrite.net/Gotlinks.php
http://www.astrobrite.net/lose_weight_fast.htmlThere's a fair amount of cleanup you can do to your site that would probably help a lot. Right now, it gives off a bit of a spammy taste. Your URLs are keyword stuffed (astrobrite.net/Arlington_Virginia_Carpet_Cleaning_Arlington_VA_Carpet_Cleaners.html) and you've got a lot of spammy incoming links with pharma anchor text from forums. You've got nearly identical pages for different cities that are likely going to be filtered as duplicate content. The about us page has images that are very large, making for a slow load time.
You may be aware of some of these already, and I know they're not what you came for, but I did want to point them out just in case you had someone build your site for you and you didn't realize what was going on.
-
Okay, my website is www.astrobrite.net . Why did OSE find the following top links on and before 5/19/11 but now it doesn't list them even though they are still linking to me???
http://www.lakerealty.com , http://www.business.com/ , http://twitter.com/Astrobrite , http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=novamembers;id=32;skip , http://www.house-cleaning-services.com/house_cleaning_VA.htm , http://www.weddingplanningdirectory.com/reciprocal.html
That is just a handful. There are more that it is not listing. My "Page auth" went from 62 to 57 and "Domain auth" went from 55 to 49. I had 6,008 Total links and now OSE shows 4,565.
If you are going to say OSE is not crawling right, why doesn't it remember the top links from before and check to see if they are still linking?
-
Here's information about OSE's latest update, form Rand's blog post. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/november-2011-linkscape-update
Are you seeing the links or are they still missing? If they're still missing, do contact help@seomoz.org.
-
Paul, what are you seeing (or not seeing) to lead you to that conclusion?
To the best of my understanding, Linkscape data processing was completed and updated yesterday and OSE was updated yesterday as well.
-
OSE doesn't seem to be updated with the linkscape update?
-
Rand will also be coming out with a post soon that talks about the latest update and what types of changes users will see. Do keep in mind that OSE only crawls about the top 25% of the web, and that crawl does change from crawl to crawl.
-
OSE was just updated yesterday. I can see the same issue you share throughout my sites. The SEOmoz site had a DA of 88 yesterday, but today it shows as 85. I noticed all my sites went down.
I know there have been some recent issues with OSE and there were adjustments made to this latest crawl. My best guess is the crawl did not go as deep as past crawls and so some links which were previously visible cannot be seen. Normally Linkscape crawls the top 25% of web pages.
I would suggest contacting help@seomoz.org and share specific examples of links which were previously visible but cannot be seen in the latest update. Those examples can help the team determine the root cause of the problem.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How can we efficiently use Fresh Web Explorer and Just Discovered Links?
Love the fresh data sources SEOmoz is building for us. However, I'm frustrated by the lack of scale the tools offer. Let's say I have 30 competitors I want to watch (which is pretty conservative - if we're targeting 100 keywords on a site, we could easily have 100's of top 20 ranked competitors). If I have to run individual reports for each using OSE and Fresh Web Explorer, that would be hours of work every day/week. Ideally, I'd like to see a campaign feature where you could add 2-200 competitors to view in one report. You could view recent links (from FWE and JDL) for all competitors on one handy report, and sort by various metrics. So for example, if you wanted to view the top 10 links your competitors have gotten in the past week, you could see that in 30 seconds of work, vs many hours of work. Any others who think this would be useful? Any ideas for how we can use the data in such a way without this feature?
Moz Pro | | AdamThompson1 -
Open Site Explorer WAY Off in Terms of Link Profiles?
Hey, One of our websites is www.inspireeducation.net.au. I have noticed although tools like Raventools capture our links well, Open Site Explorer is doing a terrible job... For example the following page >>> http://www.inspireeducation.net.au/courses/training-and-assessment-courses/certificate-iv-in-training-and-assessment/ has many many more than 8 root domains linking, however Open Site Explorer only presents 8? We are finding the same problem for almost any page we review through Open Site. Does anyone have any idea why the numbers would be so out? The new links are NOT fresh links. Many are well-established (been there for years), and even many newer ones have been there for more that 60 days. I find the same thing when reviewing competitor sites.. is Open Site Explorer working properly at all at the moment?
Moz Pro | | love-seo-goodness0 -
Open Site Explorer Says I have 1,627 inbound links, but only downloads 275\. Am I missing something?
Is there a feature i'm missing out on here? I want to download the complete link profile, but I only see 275 of 1,627 links when I export to CSV. Any guidance would be appreciated!
Moz Pro | | lipoweb0 -
Number of available links limited?
OK, I've been making use of the free LinkScape API (on behalf of a client of mine) and trying to get links (and info on those links) to a specific domain/page/etc. NOTE : I've been using it without any issue in the past, however we are currently facing some weird issues. Let's take this simple query as an example : http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/links/wikipedia.org?SourceCols=4&TargetCols=4&Sort=page_authority&Scope=page_to_domain What this one supposedly does is to get links to "wikipedia.org", right? I'm reading : The Page_to_* scopes will by default return 25 links per source domain if no limit is specified, so you can see domain diversity. Due to space limitations in our API, a general link query for a given page will return at most 25 pages for every unique domain linking to that page. And I'm saying OK, that's fine. The thing is that (instead of the 1000 links I had been getting before), I'm now getting just 25 links. NOT per... "source domain"... but obviously per "target domain" (= wikipedia.org) - or am I missing something? (well, probably wikipedia suddenly has just about 25 links pointed to it... makes sense! 🙂 ) Please, let me know what's going on with the above, simply because getting just 25 links is close to worthless... Thanks a lot, in advance!
Moz Pro | | drkameleon0 -
How to Link build for our site
Hello, A client of mine has a site that gives advice to people. It's moderately competitive. It's a content site. Using Open Site explorer, I looked up competitor's top pages and backlinks, and there were things such as sites that were heavy on directories, sites heavily on editorial mension, sites on juicy topics that I don't want to cover, and the rest was pretty much junk. Just so that you know, I only link build with quality websites that look strong, long term, have a nice design, are high quality, and are not a directory (with a few exceptions) What's the standard way to link build with a site like this? We've got 7 articles of good content that is from me spending hours learning about the subject and using my skills as a life coach. Right now I'm just adding quality content and social media. I am not a top expert in the field, but I'm learning as much as possible. How do we link build?
Moz Pro | | BobGW0 -
Open Site Explorer only exporting 120 rows!
Has this happened to anyone else? I keep running reports in OSE and then exporting them, but I only get 120 rows exported to the csv when it should be several thousand. Thought I'd ask around before raising it to the Moz team!
Moz Pro | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Viewing links gained over time
Is there a way to see how the number of inbound links has changed over time for a campaign? It is hard to tell whether links are increasing for a campaign without historical data being stored so trends can be shown
Moz Pro | | MulberrySqCraig0 -
Top ranking with no SEO
I ran an SEOMoz keyword difficulty report for the term "interim CFO services" and found that all of the websites that ranked really well for that term have good page authority and domain authority scores and plenty of incoming links.....except 1. result #5 has a page and domain authority of 1 and no incoming links, however it's ranked #5 in google SERP for this highly competitive term. see screenshots: http://screencast.com/t/NJiOn8N4l http://screencast.com/t/x6tU1RhX4j Is this ranking based solely on the domain name being 100% relevant? Did they just get lucky and hit the google rankings jackpot? If this is the case, by the same logic I am trying achieve high rankings for the keyword "outsourced accounting firm" and purchased the domain name outsourcedaccountingfirm.com and am not even ranked in the top 50 with google for that keyword. (it's very new though) any feedback on either questions above would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | texmeix0