SEOmoz total links fluxuations
-
I'm analyzing my clients and competitor back links and are noticing alot of up and down fluxuations. For example last month we had 1400 back links, last week 1350 back links, and today 1450 back links. Also, one competitor went from 25,000 to 2,700 in the space of a few weeks.
My question is how can I explain to the client that their back links are going down when they are paying for a back link building service (100 back links per month).
Thank you for your time.
-
Mathew, maybe that competitor got some links showing at the homepage/blogroll/all pages in a domain because it was a recent post or whatever, and when they've updated it, the 99% of the links are gone. Temporal issues like that one can also be seen at the webmaster tools also.
maybe it's some kind of error of the seomoz tool, dunno, but just a thought too
-
That is a great question Matthew. Unfortunately, I do not know the answer. I would recommend reaching out to the SEOmoz help desk, as it pertains to the detailed mechanics of how their tool works.
-
Thanks for your quick response.
One thing I just noticed was the competition site that lost 20,000 links has also recently updated their website with new content and new urls. This would probably cause a lot of those links to return 404 errors. If those 404 error back links were 301 redirected (eg. with .htaccess file) would the Linkscape crawler still pick up those back links?
-
The links which appear in Open Site Explorer are based upon the Linkscape crawl of the internet. Prior to July 25th, the links shown in OSE were appearing normal.
On July 25th Linkscape was updated and there were numerous issues which affected some data. Not all of the links appeared, and some erroneous links appeared. Today the Linkscape index was updated and hopefully all is well again. Everything appears to be correct for my sites.
Your client should also understand that it can take up to 2 months for a link to appear in the Linkscape index.
Furthermore, the Linkscape crawl only captures the top 25% of web pages. If you have a single website with a footer or other site wide link which isn't captured because it was removed, or because the site's ranking lowered to where they are no longer in the top 25%, that can cause a huge fluctuation in your link profile numbers. I would suggest use the number of linking domains, not the total number of links.
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
-
Does link equity still count after an expired domain is purchased?
Hi guys, We've recently noticed a (very) minor competitor competing with us, as well as some of our industry's biggest names, in the Google SERPs - and the reason why has us absolutely stumped. Aside from an awful website from an aesthetic/UX point of view, their on-site content is horribly over-optimised, with keywords on the homepage even STRONG TAGGED for crying out loud! A backlink check using OSE and Ahrefs found 19 linking domains - most of which were just trash - but there were 5 that boasted some decent DA, the highest being 43. The thing is, these 5 sites are all very generic industry-relevant "blogs" that provide exceptionally poor quality content. The thing is, they have some very high quality backlinks (the BBC, the Guardian and CNN to name just three) acquired when the websites were something different entirely. The competitor has basically bought expired domains, turned them into basic websites related to our industry and linked them to their main domain. My question then is: is this competitor benefiting from the very high quality links that are pointing at sites that are then linked to their main domain? I found an article from 2009 that suggested old links stop counting after being purchased by someone else, but we are stumped as to why they could be otherwise. Thanks in advance everyone! John
Competitive Research | | NAHL-14300 -
Abnormally high number of root domains linking to root domains
My client runs a very small business hiring out space in a single warehouse and rarely adds content to his incredibly badly optimised wordpress site. Can anyone make any wild guesses as to why my client has 2.9 million root domains linking to root domains? He also has a domain authority of 100. Strange when the number one competitor in warehouse space in this part of the world is Gumtree (equivalent of Craig's List) and that only has 9.25k root domains linking to root domains and site authority of 80. Is there any way of finding out where these links are coming from via Moz? Thanks
Competitive Research | | SocialStreets.Co0 -
How much do internal links help?
So I noticed in Site Explorer that my competitors mostly have internal links all over point to a page with the term I want to rank for, while very little external links. How much do internal links help? Should I have a link somewhere on every page pointing to my target page with the keyword, and then grab some external links? I link internally only when I see relevant, but maybe I'm not doing it enough. Looking forward to replies!
Competitive Research | | endlessrange0 -
Manta inbound link in OSE - competitor site yes, my site no, why?
Our site has had a link back to our site from Manta for a long time, but it's not appearing in our OSE results. One of our competitors similarly has an inbound link from Manta and that link DOES appear in their OSE results. I'm not certain whether that matters for us. Does it? But in any event, why would the one link appear but not the other? Thanks! Tim
Competitive Research | | tcolling0 -
Page Linking Root Domains vs Root Domain Linking Root Domains
Hi all, I am new on seomoz and I am not getting which is the difference between "Page Linking Root Domains" and "Root Domain Linking Root Domains". Could anyone please give me a clear explanation? An example would be excellent. Thank you Christine.
Competitive Research | | Cristina-Candin0 -
Is There Video Instruction on How To Use SEOMoz and Open Site Explorer?
Hi I have just signed up to use this software and would like to know how to use it properly. Is there a video tutorial on how to get the most out of the tools? I want to get the competition's backlinks but for some reason it's not openiing the page. I also want to know how the backlinks are assessed to find the real quality ones that I can link to. How are the backlinks assesed and what standards are used to asses backlink quality? Thank you Sunil.
Competitive Research | | sunilmuse0 -
Link Attack
Here is an interesting situation. Overnight SEOMoz is now reporting about 1.1 million new backlinks to my site. The links look like they were added in March of 2011 and they are all on porn sites and link back to me with the words like "Indian Sex", "Sex Bathe", and "insex." This appears to be yet another attack on my site and it looks like it happened right before the April Panda update that hosed me. As an example of one of the pages you can look at seapotentialdifference.com/inurlife/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3081 and look for the link for Indian Sex. They linked to my forum and not the home page. At the same time SEOMoz discovered these links my DA dropped from 62 to 58. I'm wondering if anyone thinks these issues are connected. More importantly, does anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this? For some reason the PA and DA of the porn site pages is above 70. This will probably be an ongoing battle for me since I am a journalist that covers the debt relief world and scammers don't like for me to expose them in an effort to protect consumers.
Competitive Research | | rockpaper0 -
Are My Links Valuable?
I have been link building for a couple months now. I am having a hard time trying to figure out which sites are even worthy of getting links from. Obviously, those that are clearly link farming, or have lots of ads throughout their site are not valuable. I use OSE, but don't know what is a good P.A or D.A. and what it means when one is much higher than the other (and if that is a bad thing). I also use compete.com to give me a general idea of the unique visitors going into a site. Any tools I can use to help evaluate the strength of specific incoming links/ specific websites? Any ideas or thoughts would be helpful. Thanks So Much, Melissa
Competitive Research | | SEOneophyte1