Why are inbound links not showing up?

[ICM]

I'm new to SEOmoz but have a question regarding inbound links that I don't see posted in the forum.

In order to become more familiar with SEOmoz tools, I've been checking out sites that friends and family members have created as practice. Things have been going really smooth until I came across a 2+ year old page that should have included an inbound link from wsj.com but said link is not appearing in OSE for this page.

Background: A friend of mine has a (basically) defunct blog that had a pretty well trafficked posting in 2009. However, when I use OSE to check out both the domain and page inbound links, I don't see the aforementioned inbound link from wsj.com.

Why is that? Or, it's insanely late - am I missing something?

Friend's blog posting:

http://bcclist.com/2009/04/21/craigslist-killer-megan-philipcom-removed/

WSJ posting with a link to my friend's blog (4th paragraph...anchor text = "taken down"):

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/04/21/who-is-megan-mcallister/

No rush. Again, I'm doing this as practice and being new to the site, I figure I'm overlooking something. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[RyanKent]

Should I suggest my friend build a few links on his blog to the WSJ posting in question?

No. If he did then it becomes more of a link exchange which is not the desired outcome.

Or, does building links to the page mean that he needs to create a blog elsewhere, make content relevant to Megan McAllister, and build links to the WSJ posting?

Most of the time you want all the links you build to be pointed at your site. An undiscovered link from the WSJ is a reason for an exception. You don't want to build a new blog for this purpose as that would be manipulative. Instead, locate other sites which may be interested in this article and let them know about it so they may link to it.

One final note. Performing these steps will help the SEOmoz crawler locate the article, but Google already has the page indexed. If you search Google.com for "who is megan mcallister" you will notice the page is the second result.

[ICM]

That (act like a web crawler and see if you can get to the link) is great advice. Thank you!

I may need to apologize in advance for this question but...

• Should I suggest my friend build a few links on his blog to the WSJ posting in question?
• Or, does building links to the page mean that he needs to create a blog elsewhere, make content relevant to Megan McAllister, and build links to the WSJ posting?

[RyanKent]

Hi ICM,

Your question is quite logical. There are two possibilities:

1. (Less Likely) There is an issue with the Linkscape Index where it missed this record. You can submit this example to help@seomoz.org and request the issue be investigated.

2. (More Likely) The link is buried too deep. The WSJ is an outstanding site from which to earn a link. Even the top ranked sites have a limit to how deep you can travel before running out of juice. There are links on DMOZ, for example, which are not indexed because they are simply buried too deep.

Question for you - If you go to the main page wsj.com, how many clicks would it take you to open the page? Don't use the site's search function, but instead move through the site the way a web crawler would, by clicking links.

From the home page I went to the blog page. From there I am stuck. I tried the sitemap but could not locate a link to the archives. There is a section at the bottom of the blog page titled WSJ Blog Archive but I was unable to locate any helpful link. There is an alphabetical index on the page and I tried "W" for the article title as well as "M" for Megan McAllister. Neither were helpful.

I am not a savvy user of the WSJ site so perhaps I am missing something. Otherwise it is possible the archive section from 2009 is not reachable via links in which case that would be the problem. If that is the case, you can help resolve the issue by building links to the page which could then be discovered on a future crawl.