SEOmoz Not Picking Up Links
-
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?
-
Mine hasn't been picked up by Moz but I have a bunch of high ranking links.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Tumblr and Link Equity
Hi Moz Community, I've recently decided to start a project where I gather 1,000 great examples of something that's searched for often, and am thinking that posting it to a Tumblr site like the following website did could be a great way to pass link equity back to my main site (with a little "site by [my site]" somewhere in the header or footer). While I was super pumped about this idea today, and have now gathered almost 500 of my examples (mentioned above), I am not seeing link equity passed from this site, even on the non-redirected links here: http://gothamlogos.tumblr.com/ Anyone have any experience with projects like this? I've checked read the Moz Tumblr and SEO article from a few years ago, which makes it seem like this should be an SEO "win"... But using the Moz Pro account tools, I'm not seeing any of these non-redirect links (ordinary links) giving any value to anyone on this example site. Thanks so much in advance, Zack
Moz Pro | | Zack2 -
Joomla Opencart Duplicate Link Issue
With a few recent catalog changes my client is having tons of duplicate content issues. The most peculiar is one that I cannot see visibly on the site pages. This page: http://www.CLIENTDOMAIN.com/catalog/lights.html shows to have several duplicate content issues with URLs such as: http://www.CLIENTDOMAIN.com/catalog/lights/Lamp-DRW.htmlhttp:/www.CLIENTDOMAIN.com - where the domain is basically added to the end of the first URL. Has anyone seen this? Any fixes, plugins or thoughts? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | KristinaWitmer
Kristina0 -
Discrepancy between followed links. How do you explain this?
My external followed links over time have gone from 346 in late November to 402. Total external links have gone from 400 to 457. Followed linking root domains dropped from 125 to 102 (How do I find out why?). Total Linking Root Domains Over Time dropped from 152 to 126. Linking C-Blocks dropped from 124 to 42. How did I increase my links but drop the other stuff?
Moz Pro | | EcommerceSite0 -
Does Google Reward Bad Links in Some Industries?
This week I've been diving into competitive research again for several clients in different industries, and unless the data in Open Site Explorer is wrong, it really does appear that Google continues to reward sites with unnatural links in certain industries, especially industries that are less tech-savvy (agriculture, finance, manual labor). I've combed through all the links carefully, to ensure there aren't some secret high-quality links lurking, and for some of these sites that are showing up in the top ten for search they do not even one real, high-quality link. Also, their onsite optimization is often way over the top and the user experience is nothing less than nauseating. Could it be a MozScape issue, or does Google continue to reward terrible sites and link structures in certain industries? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Moz Pro | | newwhy0 -
Number of available links limited?
OK, I've been making use of the free LinkScape API (on behalf of a client of mine) and trying to get links (and info on those links) to a specific domain/page/etc. NOTE : I've been using it without any issue in the past, however we are currently facing some weird issues. Let's take this simple query as an example : http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/links/wikipedia.org?SourceCols=4&TargetCols=4&Sort=page_authority&Scope=page_to_domain What this one supposedly does is to get links to "wikipedia.org", right? I'm reading : The Page_to_* scopes will by default return 25 links per source domain if no limit is specified, so you can see domain diversity. Due to space limitations in our API, a general link query for a given page will return at most 25 pages for every unique domain linking to that page. And I'm saying OK, that's fine. The thing is that (instead of the 1000 links I had been getting before), I'm now getting just 25 links. NOT per... "source domain"... but obviously per "target domain" (= wikipedia.org) - or am I missing something? (well, probably wikipedia suddenly has just about 25 links pointed to it... makes sense! 🙂 ) Please, let me know what's going on with the above, simply because getting just 25 links is close to worthless... Thanks a lot, in advance!
Moz Pro | | drkameleon0 -
Open Site Explorer missing links
Hi, When the update of Open Site Explorer was released I noticed that the new version was missing a huge amount of links that the old version previously found. This still seems to be the case and it's pretty frustrating as we use the tool for our clients. Is this something that everybody is seeing and if so SEOMoz when do you think you'll have a solution? Many thanks
Moz Pro | | JonathanSmith0 -
Help with SEOmoz API
Hi guys, I'm trying to make API requests from my webserver via PHP. I'd like to retrieve data from the SEOmoz URL Metrics API. Unfortunately I always get the error response "unauthorized" even when I copy and paste the Sample Valid API Signature generated by your system into the browser. Is Signed Authentication not longer supported? I even tried the sample PHP Code SignedAuth.php but there's the same problem, too. If signed authentication is not longer available, do you have a code example for the basic http authorization? Thanks, Brandon
Moz Pro | | thegreatpursuit1 -
Do you have a testimonial for us? SEOmoz wants to hear them!
Hi everyone! Hope you don't mind me using Q&A to ask for your feedback, but we are looking for testimonials from PRO members on our tools, web app, and resources. These testimonials will be laced throughout the site on a variety of pages and will include -- your name, company, and possibly a photo {smile!} If you are willing to give one, please feel free to either email me -- joanna@seomoz.org, or leave in the comments below. We only need a line or two. Anything about what you think of our tools, how they have helped, etc., would be great! Thank you in advance, and I assure you this will not be a regular use of Q&A! We really appreciate your help and feedback everyone. #mozhug Joanna
Moz Pro | | JoannaLord2