Some backlinks not getting picked up by OSE -- confused to why
-
I've had what has ended up being a nightmare SEO campaign. We have sunk a ton of time into link building for the site and saw little to no traction. Just as a test, I have the site on our portfolio as a site we designed years ago. The link to the site is old. Somehow, this link does not show up on OSE, and it seems to get no credit.
http://www.happydogwebproductions.com/item/spine-and-sports.html
The backlink, and troubled campaign is www.spineandsportschiro.com
There should be a few more links too that aren't getting picked up, especially the ones I have noticed using Whitespark local citation tool. Has Google got picky with all of this? How come this site seems to be getting no credit?
-
I'll just accept that the previous link building that was done was crap and the links are too deep.
-
For the YellowPages links specifically, I would expect them to show in OSE. The challenge is how buried is the page with your link?
From the home page I tried to navigate to your page using a mouse. I clicked "More cities" then selected "Saint Paul Minnesota". The resulting page is "Currently trending in St Paul" where you business is NOT listed on the page. I tried a couple other links such as "See more trends" and "Recently Added Businesses" but was unable to locate a link to your page on their site. A crawler needs a way to locate the page through links. Clearly Google found the page but to answer why it does not appear in OSE we need to answer the question...how can a user access the page without using the site search box?
If you could research the site and learn the answer, we can offer a better analysis.
-
I get that there are some bad links or links from too deep into some sites, but I've even seen some links with not much value show up on OSE, such as the bookmarking one that is credited. Also, then OSE doesn't show links from larger directories such as Yellowbook, Yellowpages, Facebook, Angies List, etc? If you think that the other 73 root domains and links are just too deep, and this is a case of the previous link builder building links that are so bad that OSE won't consider them, then I can accept that. I was / am just worried that there wasn't something more technical going on, like something being flagged from Google.
-
I took a look at a couple links.
The scsuhockey.com site is a very low value site. It has a DA of 4. The home page has a PA of 17. This basically means OSE wont crawl more then 1 link past the home page. Content from this site may be crawled by Google, but not OSE. The link is on the 4th page of a forum post with 10 pages. This type of link has almost no value. You should expect to see the link in WMT but not in OSE. This result is the normal behavior for both tools.
The findhealthpros.com site is in a similar situation. It shows a DA of 22, but the page your link is on seems buried within the site. From the home page I clicked the "Chiropractic" link but did not see any link to your page.
In order for your link to be seen by OSE it needs to have a measurable amount of SEO value. As a rough rule, expect OSE to go one level deep (i.e. 1 click) from the home page for every 10 DA points. If you receive a link from a site with DA 40, the link needs to be within a maximum of 4 clicks from the home page. Alternatively, the page with your link could have direct links to it which OSE might find.
-
A lot of these links are all over 1 year old, and not many have even been made in the last 60 days. I quickly listed a few big name sites, a source related and a random forum post one.
http://www.yellowbook.com/profile/spine-and-sports-chiropractic_1820959785.html
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Spine-Sports-Chiropractic/122260357799431
http://www.yellowpages.com/saint-paul-mn/mip/spine-sports-chiropractic-22853231
http://www.angieslist.com/companylist/us/mn/roseville/spine-sport-chiropractic-reviews-2098534.aspx
http://www.findhealthpros.com/index.php?cmd=show&id=2081
http://www.scsuhockey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1611&start=45
-
I am just confused to why OSE only shows 7 vs. the 80 in Google Webmaster Tools.
Have you built a lot of links recently? It will often take 60 days for a link to be visible in OSE.
Another consideration is OSE does not capture every link. It examines approximately the top 25% of websites. Generally speaking, if a link is not visible in OSE and is not new, the link does not offer much value.
If you would like further analysis, feel free to share a couple links which you see in WMT but not in OSE.
-
It should have been mentioned right away, but Google Webmasters Tools shows 80 linking root domains, and OSE shows 7. I understand that linking from good sources is the best and should be the only technique, and believe me there are a few good links in there. I am just confused to why OSE only shows 7 vs. the 80 in Google Webmaster Tools.
-
Okay, I get that a link from the portfolio would not carry much weight. Understood. People aren't going to search for Roseville Chiropractor, find the portfolio and think "Eureka!"
I wasn't expecting this link to be anything big at all, it was just an example of a bunch of links that never got picked up by OSE. Maybe that was a bad example, and I should have chose a link from a directory that never got picked up by OSE.
I'll accept the answer that if it potentially carries little to no weight, OSE will not consider it. I was under the impression that if a site that has at least a little page authority has its pages crawled, then the backlinks would be indexed. I know the backlink wouldn't offer much value in this case, just was looking for more of a technical answer to why.
-
Somehow, this link does not show up on OSE, and it seems to get no credit.
There are two readily apparent issues with the webpage presented at: http://www.happydogwebproductions.com/item/spine-and-sports.html
Issue #1 - no visible linking. If I was located on the home page of the HappyDogWebProductions.com site, how can I get to this page? Apparently I need to click from the Home page > What We Do > Portfolio > Design/Development > HTML/CSS > Spine and Sports.
There is simply not enough authority to cause crawlers to go that deep. The page should either be moved to a URL closer to the home page or earn it's own direct links.
Issue #2 - the page lacks content. "Spine and Sports Chiropractic needed a website to separate themselves from the competition. They ended up with just that."
The page is 90%+ duplicate content. The header, footer, comment box, etc. comprises the majority of the page's text. There is nothing worthy of indexing.
Ask yourself this question...what keyword is a user likely to type in to Google where they would receive this page listed in SERPs and think to themselves "I am so glad I found this page! It's exactly what I wanted." I will suggest none.
Even if OSE showed the link, it is highly likely Google would offer it no weight at all.
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
-
Getting 'Indexed, not submitted in sitemap' for around a third of my site. But these pages ARE in the sitemap we submitted.
As in the title, we have a site with around 40k pages, but around a third of them are showing as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" in Google Search Console. We've double-checked the sitemaps we have submitted and the URLs are definitely in the sitemap. Any idea why this might be happening? Example URL with the error: https://www.teacherstoyourhome.co.uk/german-tutor/Egham Sitemap it is located on: https://www.teacherstoyourhome.co.uk/sitemap-subject-locations-surrey.xml
Technical SEO | | TTYH0 -
Get List Of All Indexed Google Pages
I know how to run site:domain.com but I am looking for software that will put these results into a list and return server status (200, 404, etc). Anyone have any tips?
Technical SEO | | InfinityTechnologySolutions0 -
Google Change of Address with Questionable Backlink Profile
We have a .com domain where we are 301-ing the .co.uk site into it before shutting it down - the client no longer has an office in the UK and wants to focus on the .com. The .com is a nice domain with good trust indicators. I've just redesigned the site, added a wad of healthy structured markup, had the duplicate content mostly rewritten - still finishing off this job but I think we got most of it with Copyscape. The site has not so many backlinks, but we're working on this too and the ones it does have are natural, varied and from trustworthy sites. We also have a little feature on the redesign coming up in .Net magazine early next year, so that will help. The .co.uk on the other hand has a fair few backlinks - 1489 showing in Open Site Explorer - and I spent a good amount of time matching the .co.uk pages to similar content on the .com so that the redirects would hopefully pass some pagerank. However, approximately a year later, we are struggling to grow organic traffic to the .com site. It feels like we are driving with the handbrake on. I went and did some research into the backlink profile of the .co.uk, and it is mostly made up of article submissions, a few on 'quality' (not in my opinion) article sites such as ezine, and the majority on godawful and broken spammy article sites and old blogs bought for seo purposes. So my question is, in light of the fact that the SEO company that 'built' these shoddy links will not reply to my questions as to whether they received a penalty notification or noticed a Penguin penalty, and the fact that they have also deleted the Google Analytics profiles for the site, how should I proceed? **To my mind I have 3 options. ** 1. Ignore the bad majority in the .co.uk backlink profile, keep up the change of address and 301's, and hope that we can just drown out the shoddy links by building new quality ones - to the .com. Hopefully the crufty links will fade into insignificance over time.. I'm not too keen on this course of action. 2. Use the disavow tool for every suspect link pointing to the .co.uk site (no way I will be able to get the links removed manually) - and the advice I've seen also suggests submitting a reinclusion request afterwards- but this seems pointless considering we are just 301-ing to the new (.com) site. 3. Disassociate ourselves completely from the .co.uk site - forget about the few quality links to it and cut our losses. Remove the change of address request in GWT and possibly remove the site altogether and return 410 headers for it just to force the issue. Clean slate in the post. What say you mozzers? Please help, working myself blue in the face to fix the organic traffic issues for this client and not getting very far as yet.
Technical SEO | | LukeHardiman0 -
Rel canonical confusion
I have 172 pages on my site coming up as having a rel canoncial tag This is not something I've added myself so I think it must either be part of wordpress or part of a plug in I'm using . ALL in One SEO? They have come up as blue warning so not sure if it's a big deal, or what i need to do to fix it. www.katetooncopywriter.com.au Thanks Kate
Technical SEO | | ToonyWoony0 -
Should I Do On Site Optimization For A Website That Will Get A New Design
Would it be wise for me to start implementing onsite optimization changes on a website, such as the changing urls, adding in keywords in meta tags, meta descriptions, etc if the website is about to get a totally new design. For example if I wanted to change the url structure and onsite optimization features would the changes still be on the new website.
Technical SEO | | TSpike10 -
OSE - still showing me links are there when they are not?
Has anyone else had the issue for a couple of months now where ose is showing links that are live when they are not. I am doing seo for a big e-commerce website so it is important i can find out what the anchor text distribution is for the domain. How is this possible when ose shows me links which are not live? There's been 2 or 3 updates and still showing expired links in our back-link profile. This is very frustrating and has led me to see if anyone else can recommend an alternative which is more up to date? And yes before seomoz reply, i know you only update a certain percentage of the web.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Backlinks to unique login pages
Hi There, This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help! The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform. For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with. Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields. So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this? Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL? Thanks in advance! Henry
Technical SEO | | hnydnn0 -
How do I get Google to display categories instead of the URL in results?
I've seen that for some domains Google will show a nice clickable site heirarchy in place of the actual URL of a search result. See attached for an example. How do I go about achieving this type of results? categorized.png
Technical SEO | | Carlito-2569610