External Links Discrepancy
-
Hello folks Apologies for my ignorance, but a SEO novice here… One of our competitors boasts over 300,000 external links, however when we analysed their links via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org we can only see around 10,000 in there “Number of Domains Linking to this Page” section. Can someone please assist and point out something which I assume is painfully obvious! Cheers, Chris
-
Thanks Marie - I agree with you 100% on using multiple tools and resources. I'd pull the data from as many sources as possible (OSE, Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Majestic), and then combine it all in one master spreadsheet, deduplicate, and then analyze.
-
Mark's got a great answer. I just wanted to add that in my experience with looking at sites that have been penalized in one way or another, the links reported in OSE are usually quite a bit smaller than what is available from webmaster tools. OSE does a decent job, but they don't get all of the links.
-
brilliant, thanks Mark. Legend
-
Make sure you're looking at the right metrics, first off. External links to the domain is different from external links to a particular page.
More importantly, external links is the total number of external links pointing to the page. This has nothing to do with the number of domains linking to your page. A site could have a sitewide link to your competitor in their footer, and with it being a big site, that one domain could have something like 500, 1000, or even 10,000 links pointing to your competitor. So while OSE will say that the competitor has 10,000 links from one domain, that's 10,000 external links, but only 1 domain linking to this page. That's why you'll have a discrepancy between numbers of external links and domains linking - they measure two different things.
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 can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
Hosting images externally
In these days of CDNs does it matter for SEO whether images (and PDFs etc.) are hosted off-site? Does it make a difference if images hosted on Flickr, photobucket etc. Thanks
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Paid Links - How does Google classify them?
Greetings All, I have a question regarding "Paid Links." My company creates custom websites for other small businesses across the country. We always have backlinks to our primary website from our "Dealer Sites." Would Google and other search engines consider links from our "dealer sites" to be "paid links?" Example:
Technical SEO | | CFSSEO
http://www.atlanticautoinc.com/ is the "dealer site." Would Google consider the links from Atlantic Auto to be a "paid link," and therefor have less of an impact for page rankings, due to it not being organic? Any insight on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!!0 -
Link from Blogspot.com subdomain...
I have found an author that has an article about a particular product we sell online. I was thinking of speaking to them about getting a link to our site. But then I looked at the stats: <label>Page:</label><label id="Page Authority" class="key lsdata">PA:1</label><label id="mozrank" class="key lsdata" title="MozRank">mR:0.00</label>mT:0.00<label id="SEOmoz-data-uid">0</label> links from
Technical SEO | | bjs2010
<label id="SEOmoz-data-uipl">0</label> Root Domains<label>Root Domain:</label>**<label id="dom-pageauthority" class="key lsdata" title="Domain Authority">DA: 59</label>**24,797,212 links from
<label id="SEOmoz-data-pid">110,858</label> Domains<label>Subdomain:</label>Its on a subdomain of blogspot.com - and the page is relevant to a particular category and our e-commerce site.Is it worth pursuing the link?Thanks!0 -
Sitewide Links delete or add nofollow
This question has been asked before, and I’ve read most of the answers. However, things are somewhat different, as we are a web hosting company and have many clients that link to us site wide in the footer, as well we have a website builder application where we control the footer links on our end user's websites. Most use just our “domain name” or “Powered by Domain” Should we remove them? It does provide visitors some value as they can tell where the website is hosting, has been developed or how to sign up for our website builder or web hosting services. Right now, they are all follow, and we are working on cleaning up our link profile so looking for some great advice on how to proceed. Our link profile is very large since we are a web hosting company that has been around for 10 plus years. Thanks in advanced for your recommendations.
Technical SEO | | goodhost0 -
How not to lose link juice when linking to thousands of PDF guides?
Hi All, I run an e-commerce website with thousands of products.
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet
In each product page I have a link to a PDF guide of that product. Currently we link to it with a "nofollow" <a href="">tag.</a> <a href="">Should we change it to window.open in order not to lose link juice? Thanks</a>0 -
Modifying urls cause broken links?
I want to modify my urls for the purpose of creating clean, informative urls that can be pasted directly for backlink purposes. Instead I have urls with long, garbled, strange characters. When I change the URL it breaks existing back links! Any way around this?
Technical SEO | | natearistotle0 -
Nofollow link passing link juice
Can a link which is nofollwed pass link juice ? Please see the discussion at - http://www.seomoz.org/q/if-multiple-links-on-a-page-point-to-the-same-url-and-one-of-them-is-no-followed-does-that-impact-the-one-that-isn-t
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050