Some backlinks not getting picked up by OSE -- confused to why
-
I've had what has ended up being a nightmare SEO campaign. We have sunk a ton of time into link building for the site and saw little to no traction. Just as a test, I have the site on our portfolio as a site we designed years ago. The link to the site is old. Somehow, this link does not show up on OSE, and it seems to get no credit.
http://www.happydogwebproductions.com/item/spine-and-sports.html
The backlink, and troubled campaign is www.spineandsportschiro.com
There should be a few more links too that aren't getting picked up, especially the ones I have noticed using Whitespark local citation tool. Has Google got picky with all of this? How come this site seems to be getting no credit?
-
I'll just accept that the previous link building that was done was crap and the links are too deep.
-
For the YellowPages links specifically, I would expect them to show in OSE. The challenge is how buried is the page with your link?
From the home page I tried to navigate to your page using a mouse. I clicked "More cities" then selected "Saint Paul Minnesota". The resulting page is "Currently trending in St Paul" where you business is NOT listed on the page. I tried a couple other links such as "See more trends" and "Recently Added Businesses" but was unable to locate a link to your page on their site. A crawler needs a way to locate the page through links. Clearly Google found the page but to answer why it does not appear in OSE we need to answer the question...how can a user access the page without using the site search box?
If you could research the site and learn the answer, we can offer a better analysis.
-
I get that there are some bad links or links from too deep into some sites, but I've even seen some links with not much value show up on OSE, such as the bookmarking one that is credited. Also, then OSE doesn't show links from larger directories such as Yellowbook, Yellowpages, Facebook, Angies List, etc? If you think that the other 73 root domains and links are just too deep, and this is a case of the previous link builder building links that are so bad that OSE won't consider them, then I can accept that. I was / am just worried that there wasn't something more technical going on, like something being flagged from Google.
-
I took a look at a couple links.
The scsuhockey.com site is a very low value site. It has a DA of 4. The home page has a PA of 17. This basically means OSE wont crawl more then 1 link past the home page. Content from this site may be crawled by Google, but not OSE. The link is on the 4th page of a forum post with 10 pages. This type of link has almost no value. You should expect to see the link in WMT but not in OSE. This result is the normal behavior for both tools.
The findhealthpros.com site is in a similar situation. It shows a DA of 22, but the page your link is on seems buried within the site. From the home page I clicked the "Chiropractic" link but did not see any link to your page.
In order for your link to be seen by OSE it needs to have a measurable amount of SEO value. As a rough rule, expect OSE to go one level deep (i.e. 1 click) from the home page for every 10 DA points. If you receive a link from a site with DA 40, the link needs to be within a maximum of 4 clicks from the home page. Alternatively, the page with your link could have direct links to it which OSE might find.
-
A lot of these links are all over 1 year old, and not many have even been made in the last 60 days. I quickly listed a few big name sites, a source related and a random forum post one.
http://www.yellowbook.com/profile/spine-and-sports-chiropractic_1820959785.html
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Spine-Sports-Chiropractic/122260357799431
http://www.yellowpages.com/saint-paul-mn/mip/spine-sports-chiropractic-22853231
http://www.angieslist.com/companylist/us/mn/roseville/spine-sport-chiropractic-reviews-2098534.aspx
http://www.findhealthpros.com/index.php?cmd=show&id=2081
http://www.scsuhockey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1611&start=45
-
I am just confused to why OSE only shows 7 vs. the 80 in Google Webmaster Tools.
Have you built a lot of links recently? It will often take 60 days for a link to be visible in OSE.
Another consideration is OSE does not capture every link. It examines approximately the top 25% of websites. Generally speaking, if a link is not visible in OSE and is not new, the link does not offer much value.
If you would like further analysis, feel free to share a couple links which you see in WMT but not in OSE.
-
It should have been mentioned right away, but Google Webmasters Tools shows 80 linking root domains, and OSE shows 7. I understand that linking from good sources is the best and should be the only technique, and believe me there are a few good links in there. I am just confused to why OSE only shows 7 vs. the 80 in Google Webmaster Tools.
-
Okay, I get that a link from the portfolio would not carry much weight. Understood. People aren't going to search for Roseville Chiropractor, find the portfolio and think "Eureka!"
I wasn't expecting this link to be anything big at all, it was just an example of a bunch of links that never got picked up by OSE. Maybe that was a bad example, and I should have chose a link from a directory that never got picked up by OSE.
I'll accept the answer that if it potentially carries little to no weight, OSE will not consider it. I was under the impression that if a site that has at least a little page authority has its pages crawled, then the backlinks would be indexed. I know the backlink wouldn't offer much value in this case, just was looking for more of a technical answer to why.
-
Somehow, this link does not show up on OSE, and it seems to get no credit.
There are two readily apparent issues with the webpage presented at: http://www.happydogwebproductions.com/item/spine-and-sports.html
Issue #1 - no visible linking. If I was located on the home page of the HappyDogWebProductions.com site, how can I get to this page? Apparently I need to click from the Home page > What We Do > Portfolio > Design/Development > HTML/CSS > Spine and Sports.
There is simply not enough authority to cause crawlers to go that deep. The page should either be moved to a URL closer to the home page or earn it's own direct links.
Issue #2 - the page lacks content. "Spine and Sports Chiropractic needed a website to separate themselves from the competition. They ended up with just that."
The page is 90%+ duplicate content. The header, footer, comment box, etc. comprises the majority of the page's text. There is nothing worthy of indexing.
Ask yourself this question...what keyword is a user likely to type in to Google where they would receive this page listed in SERPs and think to themselves "I am so glad I found this page! It's exactly what I wanted." I will suggest none.
Even if OSE showed the link, it is highly likely Google would offer it no weight at all.
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
-
What about a No-record backlink in the view of bing
I have a vulnerability - when I make a backlink as a piece of SEO in some site when I inspected comparative couple of days after. It hasn't documented and I checked its robots record. It showing up Customer trained professional: Mediapartners-Google Disallow: User-Agent: * Disallow: However, is this make any backlink maintain or just this with the ultimate objective of not requesting in google. I make it clear - "Is such a backlink my site FreeDombra maintain my SEO activity or Not?" In this No-record site.
Technical SEO | | Hadia7680 -
How to get into Google's Tops Stories?
Hi All, I have been doing research for a few weeks and I cannot for the life of me figure out why I cannot get my website (Racenet) into the top stories in Google. We are in Google News, have "news article" schema, have AMP pages. Our news articles also perform quite well organically and we typically dominate the Google News section. We have two main competitors (Punters and Just Horse Racing) who are both in top stories and I cannot find anything that we are doing that they aren't. Apparently the AMP "news article" schema is incorrect and that could be the reason why we aren't showing up in Google Top Stories, but I can't find anything wrong with the schema and it looks the same as our competitors. For example: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racenet.com.au%2Fnews%2Fblake-shinn-booked-to-ride-doncaster-handicap-favourite-alizee-20190331%3FisAmp%3D1 Does anyone have any ideas of why I cannot get my site into Google Top Stories? Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! 🙂
Technical SEO | | Saba.Elahi.M.0 -
@moz staff Where does OSE get Facebook Share information?
When using OSE, where does it pull the Facebook data from? Open Graph? Like this? https://graph.facebook.com/http://www.moz.com I am trying to find out because my URLs are coming in with completely different information: https://graph.facebook.com/http://www.discoverhawaiitours.com/to/discovertheroadtohana_21a.html We are using the ShareThis plugin and I think it's not reporting the right info.
Technical SEO | | Francisco_Meza0 -
Why are the bots still picking up so many links on our page despite us adding nofollow?
We have been working to reduce our on-page links issue. On a particular type of page the problem arose because we automatically link out to relevant content. When we added nofollows to this content it resolved the issue for some but not all and we can't figure out why is was not successful for every one. Can you see any issues? Example of a page where nofollow did not work for... http://www.andor.com/learning-academy/4-5d-microscopy-an-overview-of-andor's-solutions-for-4-5d-microscopy
Technical SEO | | tonykelly0 -
I am trying to figure out why a website is not getting fully indexed by google. Any ideas?
I am trying to figure out why a website is not getting fully indexed by google. The website was built with Godaddy's website designer so maybe this is the problem. Originally, the internal links throughout the navigation were linked to “pages” within the site. I went in and changed all of these navigation links to point to the actual url links throughout the site instead of relative links pointing to pages on the server. I thought this would have solved the problem because I thought that perhaps google was not able to follow the original relative links. When I check to see how many pages are in the google index I still see the same #. What is going on? Should this website be rebuilt using more search engine friendly code like wordpress? Is there a simple fix that will enable google to find all of this content created by Godaddy design software? I appreciate any help offered. Here is the site- http://www.securehomeusa.com/
Technical SEO | | ULTRASEM0 -
Could getting referral traffic from SEO moz damage your rankings?
Buon Giorno from OS grid reference SE404481 Having just read Googles https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487 disavow contnet something troubled me... Is it a possibility you could damage the page rank of a site if you add its url in these posts. Put another way if I added a url pointing to a specific site would googles radar detect the source as SEO and penalise the site in some way? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
To get homepage to rank highly for a given term, do you only add the term(and variations) to the homepage?
If adding the term on all pages then won't the pages start competing with each other in the SERP? I'm building a site for a client who wants to rank highly for 'Southern California general contractors' and its not clear to me whether to fit these keywords (and variations) only into the homepage or if I should try to fit them into all pages.
Technical SEO | | kennysmith0 -
Very, very confusing behaviour with 301s. Help needed!
Hi SEOMoz gang! Been a long timer reader and hangerouter here but now i need to pick your brains. I've been working on two websites in the last few days which are showing very strange behaviour with 301 redirects. Site A This site is an ecommerce stie stocking over 900 products and 000's of motor parts. The old site was turned off in Feb 2011 when we built them a new one. The old site had terrible problems with canonical URLs where every search could/would generate a unique ID e.g. domain.com/results.aspx?product=1234. When you have 000's of products and Google can find them it is a big problem. Or was. We launche the new site and 301'd all of the old results pages over to the new product pages and deleted the old results.aspx. The results.aspx page didn't index or get shown for months. Then about two months again we found some certain conditions which would mean we wouldn't get the right 301 working so had to put the results.aspx page back in place. If it found the product, it 301'd, if it didn't it redirected to the sitemap.aspx page. We found recently that some bizarre scenerio actually caused the results.aspx page to 200 rather than 301 or 404. Problem. We found this last week after our 404 count in GWMT went up to nearly 90k. This was still odd as the results.aspx format was of the OLD site rather than the new. The old URLs should have been forgetten about after several months but started appearing again! When we saw the 404 count get so high last week, we decided to take severe action and 301 everything which hit the results.aspx page to the home page. No problem we thought. When we got into the office on Monday, most of our product pages had been dropped from the top 20 placing they had (there were nearly 400 rankings lost) and on some phrases the old results.aspx pages started to show up in there place!! Can anyone think why old pages, some of which have been 301'd over to new pages for nearly 6 months would start to rank? Even when the page didn't exist for several months? Surely if they are 301's then after a while they should start to get lost in the index? Site B This site moved domain a few weeks ago. Traffic has been lost on some phrases but this was mainly due to old blog articles not being carried forward (what i'll call noisy traffic which was picked up by accident and had bad on page stats). No major loss in traffic on this one but again bizarre errors in GWMT. This time pages which haven't been in existence for several YEARS are showing up as 404s in GWMT. The only place they are still noted anywhere is in the redirect table on our old site. The new site went live and all of the pages which were in Googles index and in OpenSiteExplorer were handled in a new 301 table. The old 301s we thought we didn't need to worry about as they had been going from old page to new page for several years and we assumed the old page had delisted. We couldn't see it anywhere in any index. So... my question here is why would some old pages which have been 301'ing for years now show up as 404s on my new domain? I've been doing SEO on and off for seven years so think i know most things about how google works but this is baffling. It seems that two different sites have failed to prevent old pages from cropping up which were 301d for either months or years. Does anyone has any thoughts as to why this might the case. Thanks in advance. Andy Adido
Technical SEO | | Adido-1053990