External Link Detection Very Slow... why?

[NewWindow]

Hello. I'm new to MOZ and I'm now comparing it with ahrefs. I can't afford to have an account with all SEO tools that are out there, but I have to start somewhere.

I really like MOZ a lot. However, there is one major issue - it updates backlinks every 3 weeks, or what? I registered to ahrefs trial today just to make sure I don't regret in the future that I bought the first service that I tried (MOZ), and I was amazed that ahrefs showed all my website's backlinks straight away. MOZ is saying that next scheduled update for Externals Links is going to be on Sept 14.... emm sorry? My trial will run out by then. It now shows exactly 0.

Pricing is nearly the same and in Today's fast paced world ahrefs seems to tick the ever so important backlinks quality box.

So here is my question. Dear MOZ, are you going to speed up the backlink data delivery? Are you working on it, or you think it's just ahrefs's gimmick?

If you can promise faster speeds, I'll be happy to stay subscribed with MOZ and wait because I like the UX a lot. However, at the end of the day speed is important and if my client requests the latest report, I don't want to tell him that he needs to wait a month for it.

Many thanks for reading and I hope to hear back from someone.

[NewWindow]

I just got a reminder from MOZ in my mailbox to see responses to my question. There are none, what a shame. I'm moving to Ahrefs.

[NewWindow]

Kristina, I really appreciate your extended answer and trying to explain how MOZ works, but you didn't really answer my question apart from explaining the process.

A competitor page that ranks in Google SERP in number 1 position (when I search for 'digital marketing agency') shows a domain authority of 1 (ONE!) in MOZ. And I live in London - there are lots of marketing agencies here so my competitor must be quite good at SEO. The domain has been active for 1 year and 6 months which means your crawler would have seen it if it would have been good enough.

Same story is about my client's domain, which has 12 backlinks from which 8 are fairly authoritative domains and again MOZ shows a domain authority of 1 and 0 backlinks.

I mean, really? Am I missing something here? I don't see the quality you are talking about Kristina. Ahrefs shows all the backlinks and correct information for the websites I'm researching, MOZ doesn't.

Please prove me wrong, because MOZ subscription is slightly cheaper and I don't want to pay for the Ahrefs subscription which is quite expensive, but you really leave me no choice here, dear hard working people at MOZ.

So my question was (and still is) - are you planning to improve your backlink service - both speed and discovery? As I said earlier, I'm happy to wait a little, but if you will answer something vague and not to the point then I have no choice but to move to Ahrefs

[KristinaKeyser]

Hi there! Kristina from Moz's Help Team here.

It is true to our Mozscape index is scheduled to update roughly once a month. Since Moz focuses on quality of links over quantity, we are always focused on the most relevant links to display to our users. It's possible that Moz's index will leave out some of the lower-quality (non-link juice providing) links out of our index because of this. So, that might explain why you may see some discrepancies with what other tools may be showing.

Just a few points on 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 ~130 billion URLs

The idea here is that we're focusing on the highest-quality links we can find, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we're aiming to report the most valuable ones available!

Most new sites and 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 reasons - including the crawl-ability of sites, the number of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories.

You can see our most recently updated schedule here as well as some more technical metrics on our Mozscape API Updates page. You can also see when the last and next updates happened on the Open Site Explorer (OSE) homepage at any time.

I know this is a ton of information, so if you have any questions or if I didn't make anything clear enough, please don't hesitate to ask! And as always, you can reach our team by emailing help@moz.com anytime.

Thank you!
-Kristina