Total Linking Root Domins

[rattleanddrum]

I'm still very new to link building and SEO, (only one month in!) I have a reasonable starting point as our web site is fairly well designed but I have a long way to go to catch up in what is a very competitive market! (Music Retail).

My question is regarding Open Site explorer and its ability to accurately reflect back links. Looking at total quantity of unique back link domains Open Site currently has me at 36 domains, Google webmaster tools has me at 187!! The one site that all my 'watched'  competitors has is DMOZ, this gives them a great boost on the SEOmoz and open site rankings. I have 3 links on DMOZ and they all show up on my Webmaster tools yet don't show on either SEOmoz or open site. I've left it for a couple of months to see if it caught up but no real change.

My worry is that there seems little value in the SEOmoz tools if their not at least as complete as Google webmaster is to allow me a fair comparison! Is there anything wrong with my setup on SEOmoz??

[RyanKent]

Your link is 5 clicks away from the home page which, for DMOZ, should be sufficient enough for the link to be discovered. I checked the AHREFS and Raven but neither show the link either which causes me to suspect this link is new. Can you confirm what date the link was first created?

I checked some other links from the same DMOZ page and they are not being seen by OSE either, but they do appear in AHREFS and Raven. I therefore opened a ticket with the SEOmoz help desk to investigate this issue.

Hopefully, the link will appear on 5/29 after the next update.

[rattleanddrum]

This is the link:

http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Derbyshire/Derby/Business_and_Economy/Shopping/

If anyone has an insight let me know!

[RyanKent]

Across the board, SEO tools can benefit from significant improvements, including the SEOmoz tool set. I was excited to learn about SEOmoz recent acquisition of $18 million. I am hopeful a significant portion of that budget will be allocated towards the development and improvement of SEO tools.

With the above stated, I do not anticipate any SEO tool to be able to keep up with the massively number and type of changes made by search engines. Just look at the past year. The following changes were HUGE: Panda, G+, Local, Bing taking over Yahoo, HTML5, a massive increase in mobile usage, Penguin and much more.

I too am seeking better tools and if you find them please share them with the community.

With respect to your DMOZ link, was it earned in the past 60 days? If it is older then 90 days and has not shown up in OSE, it is unlikely to appear after the next update. That's about all the information I can share without examining the link.

[rattleanddrum]

In response to the DMOZ depth, it is no deeper than my competitors, in some cases less deep but theirs are showing in Open Site and SEOmoz. The only reason I highlight that particular link is simply that it has reasonable value and my competitors have it in their link profiles on Open site.

I'm guessing my only choice is to wait another month to see if it appears.

I just want to state that I wasn't trying to rubbish SEOmoz as such, It's a fantastic website with excellent content, invaluble for a new starter. I was just finding it difficult to make a valid comparison particularly when there was so much disparity between the Google Webmaster results and Open site explorer.

[RyanKent]

All of the SEOmoz tools are based upon the Linkscape crawl of the web. The crawler takes 2-3 weeks to crawl the web and then another 1-2 weeks to process the data. The SEOmoz tools and Open Site Explorer (OSE) are updated about once per month. The next update is scheduled for May 29th. You can view the update schedule here: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule. In summary, the backlinks you see are always going to be 1 - 2 months behind.

You should also know the link profile shown is not 100% complete, nor even 90%. The last I heard Linkscape crawls about the top 40% of web pages. That is perfectly fine in that, for the most part, if a link is not visible in OSE it likely has little to no value.

There are numerous other tools out there that also crawl the web in a similar manner to Linkscape. I have researched many of them and, in my opinion, the next two best crawlers are Raven and AHREFS. All of them have the same issues. They are not complete. The internet involves tens of millions of websites. There are single websites which offer millions of pages so the total volume of pages to crawl reaches incredibly high numbers.

My worry is that there seems little value in the SEOmoz tools if their not at least as complete as Google webmaster is to allow me a fair comparison!

Google had $38 billion in sales in 2011. They have the ability to index a page in seconds where it would take SEOmoz at least weeks to capture that same link. Your expectation is that a group of companies whose combined sales is less then 1% of Google be able to produce results which are "at least as complete"? It's simply not reasonable.

If you wish to try Raven and AHREFS tools you can. Perhaps they will even see a specific link you desire such as the one from DMOZ.

If you can share the URL of the DMOZ link and your site, we can offer a more complete analysis. The problem with DMOZ is the depth of it's site. Web crawlers, including Google, only go so deep into a site. The question is, using your mouse, how many clicks would it take to get to your DMOZ link from the DMOZ home page. The design of a site like Wikipedia, for example, is very flat. The design of DMOZ is very deep. The page which contains your link matters a lot.