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
-
How do I get coupon information like retailmenot has on the SERPs?
Hello can anyone tell me how I can implement the same tactic that RetailMeNot is using to populate coupon information in the search results? They have below there meta description 4 fields labeled:Coupon Codes: 38, Free Shipping Deals: 6, Best Discount: 20% off, & Total Offers: 49 Is there some schema markup here? Or is this only allowed for RMN I have not seen it elsewhere but want my website coupons page to compete with them in the SERPs. Appreciate your help! dQNkHrb
Technical SEO | | Serenawong1 -
John Mueller says don't use Schema as its not working yet but I get markup conflicts using Google Mark-up
I watched recently John Mueller's Google Webmaster Hangout [DEC 5th]. In hit he mentions to a member not to use Schema.org as it's not working quite yet but to use Google's own mark-up tool 'Structured Data Markup Helper'. Fine this I have done and one of the tags I've used is 'AUTHOR'. However if you use Google's Structured Data Testing Tool in GWMT you get an error saying the following Error: Page contains property "author" which is not part of the schema. Yet this is the tag generated by their own tool. Has anyone experienced this before? and if so what action did you take to rectify it and make it work. As it stands I'm considering just removing this tag altogether. Thanks David cqbsdbunpicv8s76dlddd1e8u4g
Technical SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Backlink Profile: Should I disavow these links? Auto-Generated Links etc
Hello Moz Community, At first I wanted to say that I really like the Q&A section and that I read and learned a lot - and today it is time for my first own question 😉 I checked our backlink-profile these days and I found in my opinion a few bad/spammy links, most of them are auto-generated by pickung up some (meta) information from our webpage. Now my question is if I should dasavow these links over webmasters or if these links shouldn't matter as I guess basically every webpage will be picked up from them. Especially from the perspective that our rankings dropped significantly last weeks, but I am not sure if this can be the real reason. Examples are pages like: https://www.askives.com/ -Auto-Generates for example meta descriptions with links http://www.websitesalike.com/ -find similar websites http://mashrom.ir/ -no idea about this, really crazy Or we are at http://www.europages.com/, which makes sense for me and we get some referral traffic as well, but they auto-generated links from all their TLDs like .gr / .it / .cn etc. -just disavow all other TLDs than .com? Another example would be links from OM services like: seoprofiler.com Moreover we have a lot of links from different HR portals (including really many outdated job postings). Can these links “hurt” as well? Thanks a lot for your help! Greez Heiko
Technical SEO | | _Heiko_0 -
Why am I getting millions of links from my root domain to my subdomains?
My site's subdomains (us.example.com, de.example.com, etc.) are showing millions of links (in Google Webmaster Tools) from the root domain. This seems very unnatural to me. Any idea what would be cause this or is this? In addition, I just found out that we deliberately stop googlebot crawling GEO-IP redirects, so that when googlebot tries to crawl our UK, DE, FR, etc. sites, it is not redirected to us.example.com. I'm thinking they may be linked? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | CMcC0 -
Rel canonical confusion
I have 172 pages on my site coming up as having a rel canoncial tag This is not something I've added myself so I think it must either be part of wordpress or part of a plug in I'm using . ALL in One SEO? They have come up as blue warning so not sure if it's a big deal, or what i need to do to fix it. www.katetooncopywriter.com.au Thanks Kate
Technical SEO | | ToonyWoony0 -
MozBar picking up iFrame source as URL
Running a WordPress site with a custom theme. Using a standard wp_head or wp_footer hook to insert the standard code for a Facebook Like, Twitter count / Google Plus count into the site - basically that hook just places the code, programmatically, into the HEAD (where applicable) or right before the BODY closes. For some reason, MozBar is picking up the URL of the iFrame that gets inserted with this code as the URL of the site. I don't have it live right now due to the issues, but I can turn it "on" for anyone who wants a look. Anyone else have this issue? I'm using the code directly from developers.facebook.com for the Like box, and the Google Plus button, Twitter too. Nothing fancy here.
Technical SEO | | joechicago0 -
Best practices for migrating an html sitemap? Or just get rid of it all together?
We are migrating a very large site to a new CMS and I'm trying to determine the best way to handle all the links (~15k) in our html sitemap. The developers don't see the purpose of using an html sitemap anymore and I have yet to come up with a good reason why we should migrate rather than just get rid of the sitemap since it is not very useful to users. The html sitemap was created about 6 years ago when page rank sculpting was a high priority. Currently, since we already have an XML sitemap, I'm not sure that there's really a need for a html sitemap, other than to maintain all the internal links. How valuable are the internal links found in an html sitemap? And will it be a problem if we remove these from our link profile? 15,000 links sounds significant, but they only account for less than .5% of our internal links. What do all you think?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
301 redirects and OSE
We run a blog/video real estate site (yochicago.com) as one of the venues for sponsored content for our clients looking for off-page SEO and inbound links. I'm working with a client who we've linked to a handful of times in the last few weeks, but I'm not seeing any external links from our site on PRO/OSE. Come to find that our writer has been linking to http://clientsite.com, instead of http://www.clientsite.com, which is the canonical site. I wouldn't have thought that this would make a difference, and about an hour of web research seems to confirm that it shouldn't make a difference, save for losing a little bit of SEO credit. What am I missing? Any input would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mikescotty0