Local SEO - Directory Submissions Not Counting Towards External Links

[reidsteven75]

I'm trying to raise the authority of a clients website.  It's a local business so I'm submitting it to various applicable high authority business directories to earn more external links.  I've submitted it to about 15 directories so far; however when I run Moz's Open Site Explorer, it doesn't state that any of these directories are linking.  It's been about 3 weeks now so I assume that's enough time for the directory submissions to be indexed by Google.  Has anyone else run into this problem, and if so how did you solve this so these links are counted?

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Steve,

We don't have any plans to pull data from GWT for our index in the future. We are focused on creating a larger and more up-to-date index of our own as we go forward and we prefer not to rely on other companies for our index data, since they can choose to remove our access to their data down the line. We prefer to grow our own index over time, though we do know this can cause some growing pains.

Let me know if you need help with anything else.

Chiaryn

[reidsteven75]

Makes a lot of sense, this is a great answer Chiaryn!

I was suspecting it might boil down to this.  I do have one additional question for you.  Since this information is present in GWT, is there any plans to tap into the API to retrieve this information directly from GWT?   I'm not sure if this is even possible in their API, but may be a good way to do it.

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Steve,

Thanks for writing in and for using our Open Site Explorer! I'm so sorry that you still haven't been able to see your links in Mozscape. Most links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many of reasons, including the crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories.

Just so you know, here's how we compile our index:

• We grab the most recent index.
• We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains).
• We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled 90,000,000,000 pages (which is about 35% the amount in Google's index).

Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index. Sorry!

Mozscape focuses on a breadth-first approach. Therefore we almost always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages, and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these. This is often the case with links from directory pages since directories tend to have a large number of pages and we are not able to crawl deep enough to index every page or link.

If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that point to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Mozscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.

I hope this information helps! Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Chiaryn
Help Team Ninja

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Steve,

I'm going to alert our technical help staff to your question and ask them to pop by. Stay tuned!

[AWCthreads]

It's hard to say.

They may show up in MOZ.  It seems like MOZ shows the more authoritative links ahead of the others.

If I was in your position, I would look at GWT and take the domains and run them through Google and see how MOZ rates their domain and page authorities.

[reidsteven75]

Hmmm, this could be a problem since I really want to rely on the authority metric from Moz.  From your experience do the links eventually show up in Moz, or does Moz never end up indexing some links?

[AWCthreads]

OSE does not produce as a robust/in-depth list of linking sites.

When I want to know what sites are linking to me, I look at GWT.

When I want to know the anchor text, domain/page authority etc of the links, I look at OSE.

[reidsteven75]

Yes, GWT shows the directories I submitted linking to the website.  These aren't showing up in Moz though.  Does Moz's web crawler take longer to index links?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Steve,

Some citations can take months to go live. You might want to read:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/26/infographic-citations-time-to-live/

Hope this helps!

[AWCthreads]

Have you also checked incoming links in GWT?