How long do old links stay in Open SIte Explorer stats?

[moesian]

Hi,

In Open Site Explorer has around 2000 External followed links which would be great if it was true. I think the issue is that before my site wasn't appending slashes to the url so I think it was counting links from http://mydomain/page1 to http://mydomain/page2/ as an external link (could be wrong here). I corrected this a couple of months ago but I still seem to have over 2000 External links. When I look at the linking pages many of them are "sans slash" and have old anchor text in the link.

How long does it take of OSE to update these stale links it there any way I can prompt it to take aciton?

[moesian]

Thanks Cyrus, thats made things clear.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

The Linkscape index, which feeds Open Site Explorer, is updated every few weeks - or on average about once per month.

You can find a calendar of the updates here - http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape%20Schedule

Here's how the process works: The Linkscape crawlers explore the entire web - this generally takes at least 2 weeks. Then another couple of weeks are spent processing this information (it's a lot of processing!) So in theory, by the time it is released, the index could contain some links up to 3-4 weeks old. In edge cases, for example it's been 3-4 weeks since the last update, the links could be up to 6-7 weeks old.

Only links that were found in the last crawl are included. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do to speed this up.

That said the vast majority of these links will still exist. Linkscape has built in biases for links with permanence. This helps deal with the fact that 50% of the web disappears every year.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.