I only have 65 extrernal links after 8 months of link building?

[teddybaker]

I am currently employing an SEO consultant who has been carrying out link building for the past 8 months. having signed up to SEOmoz i noticed that i only have 65 external links when my competitors have 13,000+.

My consultant gave me a list of over 300 links he has putting into place but SEOmoz only shows 65.

What I am concerned about is why I have only so few and where the others have gone? And how do i catch up to my competitors and put a proper (better) strategy in place.

[TheGrid]

Check your site into Google Webmaster Tools and you can see exactly what they are counting toward your backlinks

[KeriMorgret]

Linkscape is limited, and right now a couple of months behind. We'll be releasing a new index sometime next week, and you should see some changes then.

[ufmedia]

A universal challenge: How do I see my links?

Linkscape is, by SEOmoz's own admission, limited.  Yes, it's getting consistently bigger all the time, but there are still links they miss because their index is small.  If you want a different perspective on where links are coming from, check out SEO Majestic or Raven Tools.  Rand has openly said SEO Majestic's index is substantially bigger than Linkscape, but it's also older.

Remember that what all these companies are doing is trying to mimic Google.  Nothing wrong with that, of course, but understand that by definition they're sometimes going to get it wrong.  Just because SEOmoz or one of these other services hasn't caught some of your links doesn't mean Google has missed them as well.

Try to look carefully at the nature of the links that your consultant has built.  If they're predominantly directories or footer links, then I'd question their value, and like you I would be concerned about the quality of the consultant's work.  But if there is diversity in the types of links - some blog links, some directories, some press releases, etc. - then it's more likely your consultant is doing good work.

One final thought.  I'm a big believer that the very best links are the ones your competitors can't easily duplicate.  Earned links from blogging, good PR and good writing can be hard for the competition to neutralize.  This is one reason SEO can be so hard.

[EGOL]

Everyone has to make up his own mind on some things... but with the way that google is acting these days.... spammy links may be worse than no links.

[activitysuper]

Go to opensite explorer and put your domain in, you could filter by do-follow as well.

If you click the results that come up you should be able to find your link on that page, if the website is spammy note it down and maybe make a list say 10. Ask him if he created these links?

You can also look at the anchor text tab and see what kind of anchor text he has been building. This should be a mix of your brand name, targeted keywords and variations.

Or put your domain up here and I or someone else (EGOL is clued up a lot) and we can have a look for you.

[teddybaker]

Thank you for this, I am clear on what you are saying about quality over quantity, but do you think there should be some questions I should be asking my consultant to make sure he s doing the right things?

[activitysuper]

You might find that 13,000+ is not from 13,000 websites, if they managed to get a sitewide link maybe in the footer and that site has 1000 pages that's a 1000 links out of the 13,000.

Also those 13,000 might be rubbish, shed loads of directories with no Auth, if your SEO is doing it right he might have built only 65 links but from 65 high Auth websites.

For example a link from the BBC could be better then 1000 directory submissions.

[teddybaker]

Thanks for this, one thing I would like to add is that another second opinion I have already had, suggested many of the links my consultant had in his report were very spammy and SEOmoz would probably ignore these, do you think this could be a possible reason?

I am concerned me SEO consultant is not doing his job well and I need to go elsewhere?

[EGOL]

There are a couple of possible reasons....

A) Perhaps the links that your SEO acquired have not been spidered yet.  Crawling every page on the web can take a while to find links on obscure pages that might only have one link into them from another obscure page.

B) Perhaps the links that your SEO acquired are on pages that are unspiderable - either because they have no links into them from the greater web or the links into them are not spiderable.

About your concern that your competitor has thousands.... go to their website and see what they have that might attract links... and you can run a link assessment for their site just like you can for your own.