How accurate is Open Site Explorer?
-
I noticed for one of my sites, a large number of links do not show up in Open Site Explorer, including some of my stronger links. That being the case, how much weight can I put on using these tools to compare sites?
I'm not trying to bash here, I really like the tools but if my PA is 29 and my competition is 34, how much weight can I put on these numbers? Or if it says my site has 50 links from 25 domains and my competition has 60 links from 30 domains, these numbers obviously aren't very accurate? So how much weight can I put on these comparisons? Are there better tools?
-
I agree with Ryan completely. I would only add that the ultimate metric is your ranking for keywords, and as you are the only one who knows what is happening to your site and link profile, you need to track and measure everything to see what effect your changes have.
Link scape is a great tool, and certainly one of the best on the planet. But it, like any of the tools need to be assessed with an understanding of the task they undertake, their methodology in doing so, and a clear understanding that it, and all tools , are guides, mere hints if you will, as to what is happening in the hallowed halls of Google search.
-
OSE is dependent upon the Linkscape index. The Linkscape database is refreshed about once per month and contains the top 25% of web pages. For SEO, that's mostly what matters. The index was last updated July 25th.
It can take 60+ days for you to have visibility to a link in OSE. It depends upon when the link was created and when Linkscape began crawling the internet.
It's a great tool to use if you understand it's limitations.
-
That's what I figured. I'm just surprised that it seems as if the majority of my sites stronger links aren't showing up. Actually, after I asked this question I began setting up an account with Majestic SEO.
What do you find seomoz most helpful for then, if you don't mind me asking?
-
I can't speak to how thorough OSE is. I know they don't find every link, but in my experience, they seemed to find most of the strong links. I can suggest Majestic SEO for a very thorough, but not free, backlink profile.
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
-
Site Crawl 4xx Errors?
Hello! When I check our website's critical crawler issues with Moz Site Crawler, I'm seeing over 1000 pages with a 4xx error. All of the pages that are showing to have a 4xx error appear to be the brand and product pages we have on our website, but with /URL at the end of each permalink. For example, we have a page on our site for a brand called Davinci. The URL is https://kannakart.com/davinci/. In the site crawler, I'm seeing the 4xx for this URL: https://kannakart.com/davinci/URL. Could this be a plugin on our site that is generating these URLs? If they're going to be an issue, I'd like to remove them. However, I'm not sure exactly where to begin. Thanks in advance for the help, -Andrew
Moz Pro | | mostcg0 -
Need advise/strategy for cleaning up backlinks to my site
I recently redesigned my website (studio35design.com), and with that, I'm finally paying attention to SEO. I used a few different tools to find the amount of backlinking domains I've built up through the 7 or so years. The numbers are the following: 52 Total Backlinking Domains (800+ links):
Moz Pro | | rubennunez
• 17 of those are from blog commenting - they are pretty much all NF
• 20 of those are from sitewide footer credits on websites I've built. They are all old, as I stopped adding sitewide links to my client sites over a year ago.
• 7 of those are from spam. My site was hacked last year which contributed to alot of it. I've since then completely scrapped my old site and built this one on webflow (Not self-hosted like my old WP site).
• The other 10 or so are from forums, and the odd photo credit. As you can tell, almost none of these backlinks links are really any good. I'm surprised that my DA is 27 really. So moving forward, I need to know the best strategy dealing with these "bad" links. For the spam, I'm going to disavow in google webmasters. As for the rest, here are my questions... QUESTION 1:
As for the sitewide links, would the best thing be to remove the link altogether from the footer of each one of those sites? Some I can't because they are really old, and I don't have access to them (I'll probably disavow), but the rest I can still go in and update. QUESTION 2:
Will removing a ton of links at once hurt my DA and my google ranking? I can probably eliminate 500-600 links within a few days just by removing the sitewide links. How quickly can I expect those links to drop off? A few months? QUESTIONS 3:
Should I disavow blog commenting links even though they are NF? Does it matter at all? QUESTION 4:
I noticed 5 or so of the domains I have links one aren't working domains anymore. How quickly can I expect those links to drop off? Thanks in advance for your help.0 -
Indexed sites
Hello I´m a newbie here on seomoz. My question is just simple but i need to be sure about that:Refering to the report which you can create in the "crawl diagnostic summary". Does the CSV export lists all and ONLY the URLS which are in the google index?If not: does a report is available where all and ONLY the URLS are listed which are in google index?Many thanks! Henrik
Moz Pro | | drgoodcat0 -
Need Good Idea for my new site SEO strategy.
Hello, I register new domain and i research on keywords and got 16 keywords for 16 pages one keyword for every page.
Moz Pro | | wildcat143
now i want SEO of my site please give me some good idea how to do my white hat SEO of my website? 16 pages + 16 keywords
How many backlinks submission i can do daily base? Directory submission?
Social bookmarking submission?
Blog comment?
Articles submission?
any more..................... Hope you will give me positive response. Thanks0 -
Why Doesn't Open Site Explorer show Domain Links from Twitter, WordPress or Feedburner?
I commented on a few blog posts and wanted to see the domain authority of those sites. When I look at our domain links, I notice the links are not there from the blogs (which I now know I have to give it time to show up). But I also noticed that domains with links to our website (regularly) were not showing up either. i .e Twitter, WordPress and Feedburner. I know we have links in these locations, especially Twitter. Why would these domains not show up? Much thanks!
Moz Pro | | SydisNey0 -
How often does Open Site Explorer Update?
How often does Open Site Explorer Update? Just trying to get a rough idea. Great tool btw.
Moz Pro | | seo3210 -
Links not appearing on Open Site Explorer
My site gained several new inbound links during December and only two of them are not all showing up on the latest Linkscape update. It seems to be the links that were created at the end of the month which are showing up, whereas a handful at the beginning of the month are nowhere to be seen. All the linking pages have been indexed by Google the links are do-follow, and one of the sites in particular is not obsure and has a DA in the 90's. I appreciate the Linkscape doesn't index everything, but I would have thought that more tof the results of my efforts would have shown up in OSE. I'd be really grateful if anyone could explain this to me please. Thanks Ben
Moz Pro | | atticus70 -
Opensite Explorer CSV Problems
I'm getting a few formatting errors in the CSVs I export from Opensite Explorer, after I've opened them in Excel. Specifically, in an Inbound Links export, there are several merged fields creating new rows. This seems to be caused by line returns in the Title column. At the moment I'm sorting these all out by hand, but it's a bit of a chore when there are lots of records. However it has to be done, because you can't sort of filter properly otherwise. Has anyone else had similar problems. If so. I'd really appreciate any tips to a) stop it happening, of b) speed up / automate the process of cleaning up the CSVs. Many thanks Ben
Moz Pro | | atticus70
