Total Linking Root Domins
-
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??
-
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.
-
This is the link:
If anyone has an insight let me know!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Losing referrer data on http link that redirects to an https site when on an https site. Is this typical or is something else going on here?
I am trying to resolve a referral data issue. Our client noticed that their referrals from one of their sites to another had dropped to almost nothing from being their top referrer. The referring site SiteA which is an HTTPs site, held a link to SiteB, which is also an HTTPs site, so there should be no loss, however the link to SiteB on SiteA had the HTTP protocol. When we changed the link to the HTTPs protocol, the referrals started flowing in. Is this typical? If the 301 redirect is properly in place for SiteB, why would we lose the referral data?
Reporting & Analytics | | Velir0 -
UTM Links Showing Up as Separate Pages in Google Analytics
Hey everyone, I was just looking at landing pages in Google Analytics, and in addition to just the URL of the landing page, the UTM links are being listed as separate pages. Is this normal? I anticipated seeing the landing page URL and then using the secondary dimension to see source/medium. If this isn't normal, what would I check next?
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
In Google Search Console: Total Clicks differ from the sum clicks on search queries
Hi.This may be a google technical question, but I've searched a lot and I couldn't find any certain information about that.The problem appears when you look at two stats in Search Console ( WebMasters Tools, some months ago), particulary in the Search Analysis.1- Total clicks2- Sum of clicks at every search query.I attached an image to make me clear.8IZsxs6.png
Reporting & Analytics | | NachoRetta2 -
Discovering broken links to my site
How do I find out if other websites are trying to link to my website using a misspelled URL or broken link?
Reporting & Analytics | | AccuraCast-UK0 -
Subdomain tracking codes on subdomain and not root
Afternoon all. I’m pretty sure this is going to be fine but I thought I would seek some confirmation before I action anything. We have a blog subdomain on our site, I have just noticed that the entire blog (built in Wordpress) has no analytics tracking code on it. As this is built in Wordpress I have just logged in on an admin account I think people forgot I had and added the code to the header section as it is a two second job. My question is this – On the main account, subdomain tracking has not been turned on, so the root domain has not got the additional _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'rootdomain.co.uk']); line of code in it. I have included this on the blog.rootdomain.co.uk code as is necessary to enable tracking. Will this work or cause tracking issues? I think it should be ok. I don’t want to have to update the root domain code if I can avoid it as that will need to go through the development team and may take weeks as they are swamped and under resourced. Thanks, Rich.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sarbs0 -
Solving link and duplicate content errors created by Wordpress blog and tags?
SEOmoz tells me my site's blog (a Wordpress site) has 2 big problems: a few pages with too many links and duplicate content. The problem is that these pages seem legit the way they are, but obviously I need to fix the problem, sooooo... Duplicate content error: error is a result of being able to search the blog by tags. Each blog post has mutliple tags, so the url.com/blog/tag pages occasionally show the same articles. Anyone know of a way to not get penalized for this? Should I exclude these pages from being crawled/sitemapped? Too many links error: SEOmoz tells me my main blog page has too many links (both url.com/blog/ and url.com/blog-2/) - these pages have excerpts of 6 most recent blog posts. I feel like this should not be an error... anyone know of a solution that will keep the site from being penalized by these pages? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RUNNERagency0 -
Does prevent links from being included in Google Webmaster linking sites report?
My client has clean links in edit from nytimes.com. The links do not have nofollow tags. Google Webmaster stopped including links from nytimes.com in the external linking domains report and we don't know why since the URL is still live. The nytimes.com URL includes this tag in the source code: Are links on pages with NOARCHIVE still counted in Google Webmaster linking domains reports?
Reporting & Analytics | | ebenthurston0 -
Linking domains vs Inbound Links
Hello, Whats the diference between Linking domains and Inbound links in Open Site Explorer? And also with is most important to analyze? Tks in advance! Pedro Pereira
Reporting & Analytics | | PedroM18