SEOmoz Not Picking Up Links

[SebastianDyer]

I'm finding that SEOmoz often doesn't pick up on many of the links my client's websites are attaining.

The links do appear in search engine and often have a high domain authority (often PR links, which I why I follow up to see if they've been picked up). I do tend to see many of the links appear in webmaster tools, so it's a little frustrating that they don't appear, even after months of pages being live.

Thoughts?

[JacobEdward]

Mine hasn't been picked up by Moz but I have a bunch of high ranking links.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Jacob,

This isn't uncommon. OSE and Mozscape crawl the web and do their best to report on links most likely to influence rankings and traffic, but they don't report all links. The latest index, I believe, is around 90 Billion links. It's a pretty good index, but we can do better, and have plans to do better going forward:

http://moz.com/products/api/updates

My friend Aaron Wheeler gave this explanation of how our crawlers work:

"We update our Linkscape Index every 3 to 5 weeks. Crawling the whole internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks. And then we’ve got 1-2 weeks of processing to do on those links to determine which are the most important links etc. You can see a schedule of how often we update, and planned updates here.

Linkscape focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site’s information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.

If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.

I hope this information helps! While the site may not be indexed yet, give it some time – maybe we’ll see it in OSE and Linkscape next month.

Best of luck!
Aaron"

We know update the index every 2-3 weeks, and do a good job of finding/reporting the most important links on the web, but sometimes we miss a few links on less popular pages. We hope to continue to do a better job finding important links!

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.

[NakulGoyal]

In my opinion, the best way to Audit/Report links if you are building a considerable amount of links every month is to use Majestic, Ahrefs, OSE, GWT backlinks, get rid of the duplicates and identify the new ones from the same list from the previous month.

In my opinion, that's the most accurate way of auditing your total backlinks. You can't rely on any one tool if you are looking for "All" or "Most" of your backlinks.

On a side note, do you see those links appear in Fresh Links or Recently Discovered Links from OSE ? It might not hurt to send a 5-10 of such examples to help@seomoz.org and let them see what they think.

[SebastianDyer]

Thanks Nakul.

I'm quite aware that as long as Google can see the links, it's all good My frustration stems from a reporting point of view - a major reason why I have SEOmoz.

[NakulGoyal]

Sebastian, as long as the page you have a link in Google's cache, I would not worry about it. Further you said they appear in GWT, that's perfect. You need the SE's to be able to find the link and their cache of that page should have the link. As long as that's the case, don't worry about which tools found it and which didn't. There's an infinite amount of content on the web that is growing by the second. It's technically impossible for any bot or spider to make sure they index the entire web at a 100%. I would suggest not to get frustrated but to continue to build your website content and links so that you continue to improve.

I hope this helps.