Discrepancy in Competitive Link Analysis?
-
I currently have a campaign set-up that monitors a few competitors compared to our site. When I look at the Root Domain Metrics I see that Company A has 2,053 total external links, and Company B has 1,632 total external links.
I wanted to view these links in more detail so I ran Advanced Inbound Links reports. The reports returned 432 results for Company A and 693 results for Company B.
Shouldn't these numbers match up with each other, or am I missing something?
Also, I noticed that in the Inbound Links analysis for my competitors there are a number of results listed that are not actually inbound links, but are internal links from there own site.
Is there a reason these are appearing?
I am having problems because I am trying to use this campaign to show the improvements in our site vs our competitors. However, OSE shows dramatically fewer total external links for our site (about 260 vs 3200 in Webmaster Tools) and I cannot tell if the competitor data is accurate?
Thanks
-
I don't want to be rude, but my original question has not been answered. Any thoughts?
-
Awesome. I'd figured that it might be the internal links.
-
Erica,
Thanks for taking the time to respond to this question. Unfortunately, one question still remains unanswered. I understand the limitations of OSE, and I can live with that for now.
However, I still do not get why the root domain metrics for my competitors show significantly more "total external links" than the Advanced Inbound Link report I ran. I do not believe this has to do with filters, especially since OSE is reporting **fewer **links when I run the advanced report.
It might be that I just don't understand the terminology, which is what I am trying to figure out. What is the difference between Total External Links that I see in Competitive Domain Analysis for a campaign and the Advanced Inbound Link report analysis for the same domain? Since the numbers are different I assume the terms are not the same, but I do not understand why.
EDIT - I figured out the internal links showing up issue, they are actually from a different language version of the companies site so they show up as www.example.de linking to www.example.com.
Thanks
-
OSE has filters on it that you can use to include or discard internal links. Check out those filters and see how they're set. Default includes internal links and also no-follow links. Depending on what info you're looking for.
OSE's data is populated with our Linkscape crawler. We do this so we can have the best data possible and try to only crawl quality links. Read more about our latest updated that included 58 billion URLs. That said, we do not crawl as many links as Google, so we do not report as much. However, by trying to crawl the best data out there instead of everything, we stand by our competitor comparison as the only backlinks we're not picking up compared to Google are low-value ones. No crawler -- even Google -- picks up every single backlink to your site.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Historical domain analysis & competitive link analysis
Hi. I have a problem with the analysis of my campaign and specialy with the historical domain and the competitive link. I don't see any upgrade since july. Thank you for your help. A.Reille
Competitive Research | | Alex750 -
Link vs Subdomain Language redirect
Hi all, I'm managing a website that uses a redirect to show different languages to the users. I mean when a user access the site from any country it sees the full domain but when it access it from Italy, France or Germany it goes to domain.com/lang=FR or IT. I see that other sites use a technique to redirect to it.domain.com or fr.domain.com but I have doubts about which one is better. We do an aggressive link building strategy and we have a lot of links to the root domain across the various languages. Is it better to do the link building to the it.domain.com and fr.domain.com, depending on the language source of the link instead of the root? I'm seeing that some of our competitors are doing this but I'm afraid is going to spread the link juice across many subdomains and lose power to the root. Thanks in advance
Competitive Research | | nunob.staredition0 -
Only 4 Internal Followed Links
Hello , i compared our (www.bighunter.net) and competitor pages. Only 4 internal Followed Links are in result page . I don't understand why Thanks for any answer
Competitive Research | | lbecarelli0 -
Is there a way to establish how old a link to a site is?
I wonder if anyone has any insight on the above question.
Competitive Research | | InTouchMarketing560 -
Competitor analysis
Hi This is obviously a well worn question (I've read the great blog by Sam Crocker last year - see below), but I'm looking for an updated set of opinions on sources of competitor data. The competitor data I'm interested in is traffic volumes either aggregated or disaggregated by referral source (i.e. organic search, PPC, email, social etc.). The types of data I've checked so far are Google Trends for websites (no disaggregation), Alexa (some good sources of free data) and Experian's Hitwise (too expensive for my current needs). In addition I'm aware that Compete will be providing an interface for such data in the UK in January at reasonable rates for what I'm after. I'm interested in views on these and other sources in relation to experience of their relative accuracy, costs, pros, con etc. Ideally I'm looking for something that is free, comprehensive, and is not being used by the competition - is that too much to ask!!! 😉 Any inputs would be greatly appeciated. Thanks in advance! Neil Sam's great blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/monitor-competitor-traffic
Competitive Research | | mccormackmorrison0 -
List of all outbound links to a specified site
For example, I want to search for every link to my site from stumbleupon. Is there a way to do this? Much thanks in advance!
Competitive Research | | TrevorMcKendrick0 -
Why are links not being added to my Domain Authority
I have just compared my domain authority with competitors and I can see that they are outscoring me on links from YouTube etc. Even though I have same set-up with regard YouTube and Squidoo etc and am also featured on Dmoz... these are not being added to my domain authority. Any ideas?
Competitive Research | | manedog0 -
How does a site get to no 3 in Google with no KW in their links?!!
Hello everyone, my first post - ahhh I'm investigating a niche and there is a site that should have no right being there in my view. It's no. 3 Google UK for 'company formation' with a small site with 65 weak links from only 7 domains and hosted in the US. But more importantly, the Open Site Explorer says there is not 1 link with that term in its anchor text. This I find crazy and makes me suspicious. But before I go back to my client saying "oh they must be black hat" I would like your expert views. I'm not sure whether to tut or congratulate them and for the first time I'm not sure what reasons to give for their amazing performance! What's your views?
Competitive Research | | GOYMedia480