Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Open Site Explorer and Expired Links?
-
Hi guys,
I've been checking a few domains for SEO purposes and it appears that OSE is indexing a lot of links which no longer exist, this has been the case for over 6 months - does OSE cleanse expired links? As I'm sure they will be contributing to authority in the eyes of Moz?
-
Though you are correct.
I believe the talk you are referring to from Rand is about Google.
-
The main index uses data that was crawled in the last 120 days (we may expand that number).
But it includes all the domains/pages that we crawled and all domains/pages that were linked to by pages that we crawled. So a page/domain may exist in the index if there is a link to it on a page. But pages that don't exist tend not to have a lot of links to them as a result have a very low PA/DA.
Once crawl data gets to old it will not be used for further index so bad links will expire that way.
-
According to testing described here: http://moz.com/blog/7-empowering-mozcon-presentations
Some link value is, surprisingly, retained even after the link is removed.
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
-
Unsolved Huge Increase In Internal Links + Domain Authority Tanked
Hey, I am very concerned about the link metrics I am seeing, really hoping someone can help. In October last year there were a total of 34.7K 'total links' attributed to my E-commerce website . This compared to 41.2k and 213k links attributed to my two main competitors. In November, my website had a forced update due to incompatibility issues my shopping cart version was having with the server on which it is hosted. (I was told by my web developers / hosting company that their server was upgraded.) This update created many problems such as checkout issues, page layout issues, sitemaps not automatically regenerating and the big one - it reverted back to http instead of https. Along with my developers, I spent 2 weeks fixing all of the issues until everything worked correctly and https was reinstated. After initial warnings from Moz, I have not received any critical crawler issues or warnings, big ranking drops etc since November. I was satisfied that all was ok. However, in November my 'total links' jumped to 81.5k and have since continued to balloon. December - 309.1k, January -335k, February - 665k, March - 716k, April - 719k, May - 742k, June - 751k. In the same period (November - June), my external links went from 5.3k - 8.7k. So it appears the huge increase in links are internal. In my latest report it states that 'internal follow links' are up by 8k and 'internal no follow links' are up by 1k. This is insane. I cannot understand why I have so many internal links and why they keep increasing. I maintain the website with updates, blog articles etc but no more than I have in the past several years. Worryingly, once this increase in links started being reported, my Domain Authority has also tanked. In October my DA was 37 (higher than my competitors) and has since dropped as low as 19. It has gone up to 21 this month (still significantly lower than my competitors). I have spent hours researching why this huge increase in internal links could be happening but have got nowhere. If anyone could advise what the issue could be and how I can fix it, I would be eternally grateful. Issues I have discovered along the way that may help with analysis:
Link Explorer | | g3mmab
My site has many 404s (hundreds) - all relate to urls of old images that have been removed from the website. The 'Top Hits' on my website are from blogs (some spammy) to these deleted image urls that return a 404. I don't use any plugins. I do get 'duplicate content' notices as my blog posts archive themselves and generate new urls - as an example - 'blog post name' archived December 2023. It may be the case that the old http urls have been redirected to https but I have no warnings for 'redirect issues' in Moz. Thanks for taking the time to read this and thanks in advance for any help.0 -
Unsolved How to remove these spammy links
I've noticed that my website's spam score has increased recently, and upon further investigation, I found some spammy links pointing to my site. and my website www.fastlandoffer.com Moz Smap Score is 16
Link Explorer | | FredericoSeo
5 I haven't engaged in any spammy tactics, so I'm not sure how they got there. Does anyone have any tips or suggestions on how to effectively remove these spammy links from my website and improve its overall credibility and search engine rankings? Any insights or experiences would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!0 -
Unsolved how do I check the outbound links?
Hello everyone,
Link Explorer | | ZeonAley
I have a question about the links explorer: how do I check the outbound links? I have a website that I want to know its outbound links. Do I have to buy the Moz Pro method for that?0 -
How is Moz DA affected by spam links? Disavow file?
So it does not appear that moz let's you upload your disavow file. So when moz calculates your DA how do spammy links factor in? After digging through our GA it appears our site was hit with the 2016 penguin update and never recovered. Our weekly visitors were 2k, then dropped to 500 and have stayed close to that level for a while. We've used the disavow tool, without success over the past 3 years. During that time we have done link out reach and built around 10 legit good quality DA links since. But we have not recovered. At this point i'm thinking I should just remove the disavow file. Moz says our spam score for our domain is 5%.
Link Explorer | | jessicapremier0 -
How do you check for .gov and .edu backlinks using the new link explorer?
I'm trying to do an audit but I can't seem to figure out how to find .edu and .gov backlinks from the new link explorer. Can someone please help? I'm trying to learn how as open site explorer will be replaced by the link explorer. Thank you!
Link Explorer | | AFARiva1 -
How to download full list of internal links properly with OSE?
Hi Moz Community, I am having issues getting a full list of my internal links when I go to the Open Site Explorer. When I export the internal links into excel, I am getting half of my URLs and 80% of what I am getting is absolutely crazy URLs that are super super old. Plus, these old URLs are not even showing in my campaign crawls. So the crawls themselves are different. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated, since I am trying to get a full picture on the internal link structure of my site. Thanks!
Link Explorer | | RyanRhodesGW0 -
MOZ can't find internal links on my website while Google search console finds thousands of them
When using open site explorer MOZ finds 0 internal links on https://www.glassesgallery.com while Google search console finds thousands of internal links. What could the issue be? Cr8Wk14 oGOf1gb
Link Explorer | | NathanPetralia0 -
Open Site Explorer
I have entered my site (patioenjoyment.com) a few different times into the OSE and it never seems to find it, MOZ has found it because it has done the crawl test for me a few times, found some issues and I have been working on those. But I assume that if it is able crawl my site it should find it to run the OSE. It has come back with "**It looks like we haven't discovered established link data for this URL yet." everytime. ** Thanks, Julie
Link Explorer | | patioenjoyment0