Why is open site explorer not showing the top links that if found previously.

[call4help]

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?

[call4help]

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

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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

[pauledwards]

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.

[RyanKent]

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.

[call4help]

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.

[RyanKent]

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.

[call4help]

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.

[KeriMorgret]

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.html

There'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.

[call4help]

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?

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[RyanKent]

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.

[pauledwards]

OSE doesn't seem to be updated with the linkscape update?

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[RyanKent]

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.