Discrepancy between number of links from web master tools and open site explorer.

[VIVOWeb]

Hi

I am looking at number of link to www.bagnodesignglasgow.com on open site explorer shows as total links 24 but on WMT it says 937 ?

Why are these two numbers so different ?

Thanks

[VIVOWeb]

Thank you all for your answers.

I'm confident your amazing team will make some interesting progress in regards with the above issue.

[randfish]

Hi Vivo - this is great feedback and definitely an issue we're aware of and actively working on. A few things to keep in mind re: Google vs. Moz:

• Moz tends to crawl the most important pages on most of the visited web. Google will crawl even the deep, dark, duplicate, spammy corners of the web. We've gotten the feedback many times that SEOs want to see these dark corners, too, and our big data team has been working on an infrastructure to allow us to scale closer to Google size (we'll probably get to 60-80% their size/freshness, but never quite 100%).

• Moz's index can be older - we update every 15-30 days with pages found and crawled in the prior 60 days. Thus, if you've gotten lots of new links, I'd suggest checking out the "just discovered links" tab in OSE (which often shows way more new/fresh links), and Fresh Web Explorer (https://freshwebexplorer.moz.com/) which will surface almost anything connected to an RSS feed.

• Two of our competitors - MajesticSEO and Ahrefs often have good crawl/link data as well, and when I need to see every link about a site, I, too, use multiple sources.

Thanks for letting us know, and rest assured, we're working tirelessly to improve both size and freshness (my personal estimate would be you'll start to see those results in 5-6 months).

[KeriMorgret]

Be sure to scroll down in the link that Cyrus gives, to the third set of metrics.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Thanks for you comment. I understand your frustration, especially if you found the marketing message to be confusing. As Keri mentioned, your comments have been shared with the team.

The differences between the size of link indexes has been covered extensively in other places, so I won't rehash it here. One thing I should point out: 24 links only represents the number of links to this specific page/URL. Open Site Explorer shows a total of 156 links pointing to the root domain bannodesignglasgow.com

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bagnodesignglasgow.com

I've added a screenshot below. This represents about 15% of the links listed for your site in GWT, which is on the low end in our experience. Typically it's pretty common for OSE to report between 20-40% of links found in GWT. The good news is OSE tends to index the links that "count" and are more likely to influence rankings. And as Keri mentioned, no index will be able to capture all of the links Google sees. We are working to greatly expand the size of our index, and we should be able to ship some progress on this in the next few months.

Regardless, thanks again.

XSiNPC8

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Vivoweb,

Thanks for pointing this out. I've taken this back to the company and we'll be sure that we're clear on this point.

[Andy-Halliday]

I agree but lets see to get 100% (and not even Google has 100% of your links, I use three sources for monitoring links, Google Alerts / Webmaster Tools, TalkWalker / Moz / Opensiteexplorer). But lets say you want Moz to go from 3% to 100%.

This would required extra resources on Moz end so we would end up paying higher monthly fee.

We currently pay $99 a month. Lets hope my maths is good. So $99 for 3% or $33 for 1%, to get that to 100% that is $33 * 100 that would be $3,300 a month. I can show the benefits to my MD who pays the invoice each month of the benefits for $99. Convincing him to pay $3,300 I couldn't justify that.

Also it would depend where all your links are. If they are from highly reputation sites like Mashable, BBC, et al then you are more likely to have a higher % than if your links are all from domains which are less well know and less likely to be found by the Moz crawlers.

Regarding Moz telling you in advance about the % - I will leave that to a Moz employee to explain but I guess the % would be different for everyone so would be quite hard to explain.

[VIVOWeb]

Hi Andy

Thanks for your reply.

But in my experience 24 vs 937 thats only 2.56% of links, the issue is that I cannot use GWT to check any of the competitors links profiles and if Moz is going to show my around 3% then that's not really good enough is it?

The following is from the website:

"We show you all of your data in a comparative view with your competitors. Scope out their link profiles, traffic, social activity, mentions of their brand online, trending content pieces, and more."

There has to be a fine print or something clearly mention to customers before making the purchase and inform them about this discrepancy.

Don't get me wrong I will still use Moz for all the other porpuses and I think it's a great value for money but I don't think it's right for people not to know the above.

[Andy-Halliday]

This question has all ready been asked previously and you can find the answer here:

http://moz.com/community/q/google-webmaster-tools-and-open-site-explorer-s-links-not-matching-up

But to sum it up. Google has far more servers than Moz, even though Moz is a great company there is a big difference in the size of the companies so Google has far more reach to crawl even more websites.

Google isn't perfect and will also miss links so its good to use multiple sources for seeing link data.