Why are inbound links not showing?

[TomNYC]

I run the site http://www.eurocheapo.com and am finding that many inbound links are not showing up in OSE and on the toolbar. For example, check out this hotel review:

http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/hotel/hotel-esmeralda.html

In OSE it shows only 2 links (from 1 domain), which is crazy. It has dozens of inbound links from many different domains (links:http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/hotel/hotel-esmeralda.html).

I notice this all over my site. Pages that we link between are also showing no internal links -- which is easy to disprove.

Was there a problem with this crawl? Or is the problem in our code?

Many thanks for your help,

Tom

[jesse-landry]

props to Matt! He nailed it.

[MattAntonino]

Actually what seems to have happened here is that your crawl delay is too long and Roger gets bored and leaves.

See this reply from a Moz staff:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/rogerbot-getting-cheeky

This actually might be happening because your crawl delay is too long, so rogerbot just ends up ignoring it so he can complete the crawl.  If you set your crawl delay to a max of 7, then it should solve your problem.

Your crawl delay is 25. http://www.eurocheapo.com/robots.txt

So Roger isn't finishing the crawl on your site. Set it between 4 and 7 (or remove it) and on the next crawl, Roger should get you some more data.

Hope it helps!

[jesse-landry]

While I agree you should address that issue, I don't think it would have much to do with the OSE indexing. I would definitely attempt to contact a moz staffer, I think your case warrants one. Surprised they haven't stepped in with an answer yet they're usually on top of these forums.

[TomNYC]

Thanks, Jesse and Brian.

I'll keep digging into GWMT and OSE tomorrow.

We discovered some issues with "rel=canonical" tags today (namely, we didn't have them on our hotel pages and Google had indexed multiple versions of these hotel review pages).

Do you think that a duplicate content penalty on these pages could be playing into this? (Probably not, right, because Google is showing all the links to the page -- it's OSE that's not showing them).

Thanks for your help. I owe you a beer!

[jesse-landry]

hey Tom,

So this is weird. I went ahead and looked at the page in question and I see what you're talking about. I would question OSE's crawl of your site and direct that toward the moz-staff. Here's the reason:

The Just Discovered tool is showing a buttload of links coming to your page.. like 8 pages worth or something crazy. The inbound links section shows 2 domains... not sure what's up there.

If it were my site I'd spend more time and cross reference that with GWMT and maybe grab Majestic and AHREFS reports as well. Also, take an OSE inbound link list of the subdomain and see if the just-discovered links from the page in question show up there.

[Backlinko]

You're right: it is weird.

But even if there was a problem with your code -- as long as the code of the linking sites were OK -- then OSE will pick them up.

Internal links are obviously another story. I recommend checking some of your pages in GWT (use "Fetch as Googlebot")? It if comes back OK then your site is OK with big G (which is more important than anyone else).

[TomNYC]

Thanks Brian.

It's odd, because this page isn't new. It's nearly 12 years old.

I'm seeing the same thing (no inbound links) across almost all of our hotel reviews -- we have about 1,000 of them on the site, and they're mostly 5+ years old and very well indexed.

I was assuming that there was either some problem with this crawl or that I had something wrong with my code.

[Backlinko]

Hey Tom,

SEOMoz only updates the OSE index once or twice a month. So new links won't show up until they do a refresh.

As long as Google sees them you're good.

As long as you're not getting any messages in Google Webmaster Tools, your code is probably in tip top shape.