How come Moz is showing less Links to my site than Webmaster?

[chris1980]

I have 683 total links in Webmaster, Moz showing 16?

[Chris.Menke]

Chris,

Even though Google crawls more of the web than any other service, it has a metric it uses to determine which and how many links to show you in the tool.  It does not show all of your links, even though it knows better than any service exactly how many you have.

Moz, does not crawl the web as deeply as Google but it does report on all of the links it finds.  Rather than attempting to index the entire web, Moz focuses on crawling the pages down to a depth that have an impact on search results.  If the pages it crawls have outbound links on them, those are the links that are likely to passing some amount of pagerank/authority to the page their pointing at.  Below that level, the quality/pagerank/authority is too low to be of any assistance to the page it may be linking to.

So, where GWT links represent a sample of your total links, open site explorer is a tool designed to show you the total number of links that are helping you with your rankings. Other tools exist as well, and they use different crawl strategies and that present links based on different metrics.  I think the more you understand OSE, the more useful you will find it.

[mathamatix]

So with the exception of keyword ranking the data in Moz is mostly useless?

[BruceA]

There are loads of answers to this question, but in essence here is a couple of reasons..

Moz will only crawl a high ranking site regularly and therefore if your site is not high ranking and any links to it have not been fully crawled, you will not see in OSE (Open Site Explorer) all links.  When Moz finds your site and crawls it, then they will update your links etc in OSE.  This can be months apart and not regularly as in the monthly crawl.

Google can crawl billions of pages due to their huge scale, whereas Moz and others don't have this level of scale, therefore it is always recommended to use other sites such as Hrefs to get a fuller picture.

Moz is brilliant for giving us great insites into our own sites and where to improve and therefore by using their tools effectively then you will start to get higher ranking links, which in turn will result in due course to you being crawled by Moz monthly.

Hope that answers a bit of the reason

Bruce.