Why Moz Doesn't See or Count Our Backlinks?

[RegistrarCorp]

Hi Moz Community!

We have been working hard to improve our Moz metrics, measuring against a high ranking competitor to help us set our goals.

Our Majestic and Webmaster Tools find tens of thousands of external backlinks pointing to our domain.  That's all well and good.  Moz's Open Site Explorer, however, only finds 900 total links - including internal links!

This being the case, we have worked diligently to build a variety of great external backlinks, creating Bitly links and encouraging clicks on those through social promotion.  Yet, our competitor has over 7,000 external backlinks in Moz's index, while ours is not growing relative to their number of backlinks.

Can anyone share with us what they do to tell Moz about their backlinks?  We already know we have many more backlinks than our competitor, from trusted domains with good authority, yet it seems Moz is not discovering them.  We just want to understand how to use these Moz metrics to create meaningful calls-to-action.  Otherwise, it seems like a gargantuan waste of time, and our team has difficulty getting buy-in from our company to put time and assets toward tasks based on our Moz numbers!

[RegistrarCorp]

This is very helpful Chris.Menke (and SamWebber)!  Thank you for the feedback and insights.  What we have been frustrated with is that we know we are building quality links on high-ranking, authority domains, yet it seemed to us that Moz was not learning of these links.  What we've tried to understand is how Moz discovers and adds these URLs to its index.  Working on theory alone, that not all of them will be discovered or accepted for index, we just want to be able to tell Moz about these relationships we are building out there - hoping that it does move our metrics from where they seem to have sat for a while.  Again, the key issue is that we want to be able to use the Moz tools, but if we don't [get] the demanded "get results", the subscription isn't going to get approved!  Needless to say, we are working double-time to build quality links from great content, but - not being social media experts - we are sort of throwing stuff against the wall hoping something will stick.  Not the greatest strategy in the world, we know!  But faint heart never won fair lady.

[Chris.Menke]

Keep in mind Registrar, that domain metrics and page metrics are different. Moz is less likely to crawl deep into lower quality pages (even on a higher DA site) than Majestic or WMT.  The goal/purpose of that is to hopefully give you a better idea of the links that may actually be helping you rank in Google.  Not every link that shows in every link-tool actually is a benefit to your ranking.  If you're links are not showing up in Moz tools consider their quality somewhat suspect and work on building link relationships with sites who can demonstrate that relationship on higher quality pages.