SEOmoz total links fluxuations

[SharpKiwi]

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.

[PabloGV]

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

[RyanKent]

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.

[SharpKiwi]

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?

[RyanKent]

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.