Difference in incoming links between web masters tool and moz

[omakad]

Why are incoming links to my site in Google Webmasters tools totally different then in MOZ? Which is correct? According to Google as of this week I have hundreds of links coming from linkarena (dot) com (Never heard) Does any one know who they are or if they are hurting me? I definitely did not pay them to put me on there. It looks like a German site.  Thank you.

[kylie_rw]

Hello -- just found this thread when looking for the answer to my question... I had a similar one.

On my campaign, Open Site Explorer is showing only 11 incoming links to my client's website (grilloorientalrugs.com)... Webmaster Tools shows 700!  I went through WT's links, and sure enough, they are out there -- on sites like yellowpages.com, which OSE didn't even show as a result.

I understand the difference in crawling breadth and frequency.  But is it really true that Open Site Explorer is only picking up on a mere 1.6% of the total links?  Someone tell me why it's a useful tool, if that is the case?

And yes, I did verify that I hadn't excluded any of the links in OSE, and that I was looking at the whole root domain.

Thanks for any feedback anyone can provide here.

[omakad]

Thank you for the answer. I was hoping that with paying for subscription with MOZ I would get all of them or at least most of them so I would not have to do the extra steps. Your answer makes a lot of sense. I will continue looking at all of them. Thank you for prompt response.

[GlobeRunner]

Omakad, Google's list of links in Webmaster Tools is different than what you're going to see in Moz because these are separate companies. They both have their own crawlers and crawl websites differently. Moz doesn't crawl as often or as quickly as Google does.

Google has, on purpose, decided to not give us all of the links that they know about, mainly because they don't want us to reverse engineer their algorithm. There are actually other tools that will show you links to a website, including MajesticSEO.com and ahrefs.com. What I recommend is that you go to several link sources, including Google, Moz, Majestic SEO, and ahrefs, and get all the links--and then put them into one big list and remove the duplicates. That will give you a better picture of the links that are pointing to your website.