Competitive .edu Research via Open Site Explorer
-
I was using open site explorer and trying to figure out how my competitors are getting so many .edu links. Now I won't mention any names here but I am trying to figure out why almost all their links point to downloads of documents. Here are a few of the examples of sites I keep finding...
faculty.unlv.edu/jensen/CEE_468/GISTutorialWorkbook/tutorial11/LandUsePgh.lpk?arrow=nws&read=24922
<colgroup><col width="3111"></colgroup>
-
I like the opensiteexplorer method. The difficulty is what to do once you create the list of .edu's. We're using some of the other blogs on the subject on seomoz.
-
Hey John,We have made some updates to our crawling so it will go deeper into sites, and this is the first launch including the new metrics. We've discovered a bug, however, in the updated crawler. The first issue is the crawler is counting a binary file as a link, but the larger issue, is that the crawler doesn’t really know how to handle these types of files. This bug is causing some links to be improperly associated with certain domains. This is probably why you’re seeing your competitor have these .edu links - they're probably incorrectly associated with their site.
There are two steps to addressing this issue: changing how the crawler sees these file types and then fixing how the crawler handles these file types. We have made improvements to our algorithm so that we will be able to handle the majority of these files correctly, however, this update will need about a month to propagate. The fix for this issue probably won’t be seen for two more updates, meaning late September. Our improvements should catch most of the issues, but there still could be a few cases we haven't addressed. If this happens, don't hesitate to let us know; we love feedback since it helps us improve and make our index even better!The next step is to fix how our crawlers handle binary file links and prevent them from being improperly associated with certain domains. We are in the process of working through that issue right now. We’re doing everything we can to resolve this bug as we know it is alarming to see these “questionable” links associated to either your site or your competitors sites.
I hope this helps answer your questions around these .edu links, but let me know if you have any more questions!
Thanks,
Carin -
Hi John,
I think you might be seeing a known bug in OSE about links coming from documents. I'm going to ask one of the Linkscape people to come in and comment, but these might not be real links.
-
hi,
It seems the competition is just syndicating documents via education facilities to acquire links. to be honest links on low end tutorial sections where documents can be syndicated are not that great, they will hold some value yet it will not be that strong. I have seen this with competitors it is the same as paying off students to make blogs on edu blogs about your brand their are soo many un ethical things in the market which I wouldn't advise people to do ever.
You can be smart about it and acquire far better links for example if you do free work for a uni or you sponsor a university event, you just need to brain storm quality ways to achieve links on edu sites.
Regards
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 visitors dropped off- have tried everything
Hello Moz team....I love the tools but I'm more of a content created for my web site than a developer. So I am super stuck with a major money losing problem. My traffic has nearly gone to zero and I have good content, regular content, no duplicate content, and so on. Can someone help.... Today I disavowed thousands of bad inbound links found in a Moz report Since January I have been fixing pages with missing meta data found in the crawl report In December 2018 I switched over to HTTPS I have no clueeeeeee
Moz Pro | | MattBanes0 -
Noob question about keyword research
I have a client that does commercial building renovations. I looked at a lot of their competitors and did some googling to see what words people were using. Some terms such as commercial fit-outs, didn't really have any search volume. I did pick out some that had some volume, Google KW Tool said anywhere from 46 local searches for something like "commercial construction contractors" to 320 for "commercial construction companies". However, no data really shows up for local specifics like "commercial construction companies philadelphia". I tried looking at competitors in the Moz site explorer, but not too many were doing much link building to look at anchor text. Question 1) When it says "local monthly searches", is it defaulting to MY local area based on my google info? So if im in Philly area that local area is whats displaying? Question 2) I tried to run the same keyword list I pulled from Adwords tool through Moz KW tool, and it tells me some of the terms don't have ANY traffic! So know I am real confused as to whether the KW's i picked are good or crap! I attached image of the stuff. CnYyNb3
Moz Pro | | satoridesign0 -
Competitive Analysis Problem
I just discovered that, for my competitive analysis, it is set to judge my naked domain instead of www. My rel="canonical" is set to point to www., thus, www. has a much higher domain authority than my naked domain. However, I don;t want to lose all of the history I have accumulated over the years for this domain. How to I make it so SEOmoz matches against www. instead of my naked domain? Which is wiser to gauge by?
Moz Pro | | bks_seo0 -
How do you solve this issue? Pages coming up as [No Title] in Open Site Explorer
I see this when researching top pages. I know for a fact that the pages have title tags that appear to be fine on google and our site, so I'm not sure what the [No Titlle] means or why it's appearing in Open Site Explorer. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | JasonBilog0 -
Moving from a dynamic site to nopcommerce
Hi, First question since becoming a member so be gentle with me ;o) We are moving from a site using a dynamically generated ecommercetemplate to a nopcommerce site. I have two questions about this I know that 301 redirects are the best way to pass "link juice" but with the site being dynamically generated a lot of these links will simply disappear when we move to nop, meaning that they wont actually be there in order to add a 301. Any advice on this would be appreciated. How can i get a list of the pages on my current site which have the best rank in order to create the redirects. Unfortunately due to some technical issues we had with google analytics we were unable to install it so dont really have any analytics to give us some extra info. I was hoping that there would be somewhere within seomoz where i could be directed. Many thanks Chris
Moz Pro | | cjhamill0 -
Lots of site errors after last crawl....
Something interesting happened on the last update for my site on SEOmoz pro tools. For the last month or so the errors on my site were very low, then on the last update I had a huge spike in errors, warnings, and notices. I'm not sure if somehow I made a change to my site (without knowing it) and I caused all of these errors, or if it just took a few months to find all the errors on my site? My duplicate page content went from 0 to 45, my duplicate page titles went from 0 to 105, my 4xx (client error) went from 0 to 4, and my title missing or empty went from 0 to 3. On the warnings sections my missing meta description tag went form a hand full to 444. (most of these looking to be archive pages.) Down in the notices I have over 2000 that are blocked by meta robots, meta-robots nofollow, and Rel canonical. I didn't have any where near this many prior to the last update of my site. I just wanted to see what I need to do to clean this up, and figure out if I did something to cause all the errors. I'm assuming the red errors are the first things I need to clean up. Any help you guys can provide would be greatly appreciated. Also if you'd like me to post any additional information, please let me know and I'd be glad to.
Moz Pro | | NoahsDad0 -
What is the time range of social media metrics of Open Site Explorer?
Hi, I have a client with a huge efforts on social media and I want to know which is the time range of the social media data collected with OSE. Or is using some sort of APIs, so is showing totals? OSE shows this: Times Shared on Facebook: 932 Facebook Likes: 1,898 Times Shared on Twitter: 191 Times Shared on Google +1: 52 Total Social Shares: 1,175 Thanks 🙂
Moz Pro | | CristianGuasch0 -
OPen Site Explorer listing criteria?
Checking link data for a potential client who has given me access to their websmaster tools account, I've noticed that Google list over 150,000 "Links to Your Site" but yet OSE only reports a tiny fraction of this number.
Moz Pro | | G-DC
I have manually verified that there are in fact direct links from the sites that are listed in Webmaster Tools but not in OSE. Does OSE discard some links? Is there a reporting lag? Does anyone know why there would be such a large discrepancy?0