Discrepancy between OSE internal links and Webmaster Tools
-
Hi,
We have been attempting to increase our rankings for our key term for a number of months now, and we are seeing an unusual discrepancy between OSE and Webmaster Tools that we believe may be causing us harm.
OSE shows our homepage, www.unionroom.com, as having only 27 internal links (only three of these aren't 301's too), whereas Webmaster Tools is showing just over 1,500 internal links to the homepage.
The three pages that OSE are displaying as linking back to the homepage are the homepage, our blog and our accessibility page. These pages are all ran off the same template and have the same header and footer (with three home links spread across header and footer). You can see our confusion!
Is this a case of OSE's stats being incorrect (the website has been live for ~6 months) or is there an issue with our in-linking structure that we are missing?
Thanks!
-
Yep that is correct, which can be 50/50.
-
Thanks for the link David, we will take a look through that.
I've quickly looked at some competitor websites and their home links are all href="/", so would I be correct in assuming that it if this affected our website it should also affect others in OSE?
-
To provide more detail there is a relative link back to the homepage though href="/" which our crawler doesn't work well with so having the full absolute path is recommended.
Here is a great resource that goes more in-depth about the differences: http://www.coffeecup.com/help/articles/absolute-vs-relative-pathslinks/
-
I ran some inner pages through OSE (/work and /contact) and both look to be indexed.
It's weird that you say 'For example we do have /blog/ indexed but there isn't a link going back to the homepage as "www.unionroom.com"' as this is one of only two pages (blog and accessibility) showing that DO link back to unionroom.com.
In summary:
- All inner pages are crawled.
- All inner pages (that we have tested) are indexed.
- All of our pages use the same template.
- OSE is stating that only two inner pages link back to the homepage (blog and accessibility).
-
It's possible we may not have indexed those pages or they have a link back to www.unionroom.com within the source code. You can verify by putting those pages into OSE directly to see if they have been indexed and also verify the link is in the source code.
For example we do have /blog/ indexed but there isn't a link going back to the homepage as "www.unionroom.com"
-
The crawl looks to be working correctly, as in it is finding all of the pages and posts that we would expect (approximately 300). It looks to be solely an issue with the number of internal links that OSE is saying the page www.unionroom.com has (27).
All but two of our inner pages, aside from the blog and accessibility, aren't listed on our internal link report for the homepage. This includes top level pages like services, about, contact etc, all missing.
The templates that we use for the blog and accessibility pages are identical to to what we use for other inner pages, so it's unusual that the others aren't listed.
-
Anytime!
Website structure can play a part but also time timing of when sites are indexed. There can be various networking issues that can prevent our crawler and others from reaching certain pages. You can always run a crawl test to look for any possible errors which you will have time to correct before the next update: https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test
Also some pages may be blocked intentionally from robots.txt and no-follow tags.
-
Hi David,
Thanks for your reply.
I'm concerned that on the competitor websites that we are evaluating using OSE, their websites' internal links are displaying much higher numbers than ours (27 vs ~300) even though our websites are of similar size. Could this possibly highlight an issue with our website structure (i.e. crawlers are having an issue finding ways back to the homepage via inner pages, even though we have three on each page around the website), or is this a case of MOZ crawling perhaps showing incorrect statistics?
I'm trying to eliminate the possibility of OSE's statistics being incorrect before we attempt to change the structure of the website and begin testing etc.
Thanks!
-
Hi Jordan!
There are a lot of reasons you could be seeing these data discrepancies. If you're seeing more GWT errors, it could be because they have 'discovered links' through different means. Moz starts with your home page and uses recursive crawling to find pages on your site. We keep crawling until we stop finding unique links, or until we hit your page crawl limit. Bottom line, when we crawl your site your homepage is the only seed. We know that Google uses multiple seeds, so it could be possible Google is indexing more pages that way. In sum Google will never match up with OSE but it's good to use both along with other backlink tools to cover all your bases.
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
-
Question about link report
Hey all, SEO noob here, back with another question. I downloaded a link report, and I don't understand the columns Links to Page, Outbound Domains from Page, and Outbound Links from Page. Is Links to Page the number of links from the source page to the target page? Is Outbound Domains from Page the number of domains linked to by the source page? Is Outbound Links from Page the number of outbound links to any domain or page from the source page? Thanks in advance! AK
Link Explorer | | AndyKubrin0 -
Ose question
Hey why do my websites www.gardeners.scot & www.landscaping.scot not have any links showing in ose? thanks
Link Explorer | | livingphilosophy0 -
Checking link quality : help needed
In my journey of learning which links are good or bad for my website I found the series pointed out in the attached image and pasted below: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/help-implementing-google-pagespeed-suggestions where I posted a forum comment just like this one on the wordpress forum asking for advice. Apparently this links is mildly spammy (spam score of 1). What should I do with such links? Remove them? emZXKI
Link Explorer | | micvitale0 -
Do other sites linking to my page with a low domain authority affect my rankings?
Hello, my page authority 30, I see other page with an authority of 21 for example linking to us. Is this good or bad, does this affect our ranking? A lot of these don't have anchor text, I'm guessing we should reach out to these webmaster to include anchor text with the keywords we want to drive traffic to this page or make as descriptive as possible? Thanks! Laura
Link Explorer | | lauramrobinson320 -
Just Discovered links - How long before they are counted toward the PA scores
I have a new website I put up in the last 90 days. I have been watching the DA, PA and Keyword rankings. Once I set up the campaign I got a report back a week later and some data showing some keyword rankings and some DA & PA scores and links showing from 2 domains. Since this time OSE has Just Discovered 16 more backlinking domains - however the DA and PA scores have not changed ? How long after the new Just Discovered backlinks before they affect the scores I am seeing for my DA & PA ? Thank you in advance for any insight on this matter, Happy Holidays - Joe
Link Explorer | | jlane90 -
Does Moz have anything similar to ahrefs batch analysis tool?
I am wanting to do analysis of a whole bunch of URLs at once - i know ahrefs already has a very good tool for this - but I don't really want to have to pay the $79 a month if moz has something similar? I know it has the OSE. Can I do batch analysis in this? Thanks
Link Explorer | | SWD.Advertising1 -
Open Site Explorer and Expired Links?
Hi guys, I've been checking a few domains for SEO purposes and it appears that OSE is indexing a lot of links which no longer exist, this has been the case for over 6 months - does OSE cleanse expired links? As I'm sure they will be contributing to authority in the eyes of Moz?
Link Explorer | | lotterybase0