Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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?
-
Though you are correct.
I believe the talk you are referring to from Rand is about Google.
-
The main index uses data that was crawled in the last 120 days (we may expand that number).
But it includes all the domains/pages that we crawled and all domains/pages that were linked to by pages that we crawled. So a page/domain may exist in the index if there is a link to it on a page. But pages that don't exist tend not to have a lot of links to them as a result have a very low PA/DA.
Once crawl data gets to old it will not be used for further index so bad links will expire that way.
-
According to testing described here: http://moz.com/blog/7-empowering-mozcon-presentations
Some link value is, surprisingly, retained even after the link is removed.
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
-
Unsolved Huge Increase In Internal Links + Domain Authority Tanked
Hey, I am very concerned about the link metrics I am seeing, really hoping someone can help. In October last year there were a total of 34.7K 'total links' attributed to my E-commerce website . This compared to 41.2k and 213k links attributed to my two main competitors. In November, my website had a forced update due to incompatibility issues my shopping cart version was having with the server on which it is hosted. (I was told by my web developers / hosting company that their server was upgraded.) This update created many problems such as checkout issues, page layout issues, sitemaps not automatically regenerating and the big one - it reverted back to http instead of https. Along with my developers, I spent 2 weeks fixing all of the issues until everything worked correctly and https was reinstated. After initial warnings from Moz, I have not received any critical crawler issues or warnings, big ranking drops etc since November. I was satisfied that all was ok. However, in November my 'total links' jumped to 81.5k and have since continued to balloon. December - 309.1k, January -335k, February - 665k, March - 716k, April - 719k, May - 742k, June - 751k. In the same period (November - June), my external links went from 5.3k - 8.7k. So it appears the huge increase in links are internal. In my latest report it states that 'internal follow links' are up by 8k and 'internal no follow links' are up by 1k. This is insane. I cannot understand why I have so many internal links and why they keep increasing. I maintain the website with updates, blog articles etc but no more than I have in the past several years. Worryingly, once this increase in links started being reported, my Domain Authority has also tanked. In October my DA was 37 (higher than my competitors) and has since dropped as low as 19. It has gone up to 21 this month (still significantly lower than my competitors). I have spent hours researching why this huge increase in internal links could be happening but have got nowhere. If anyone could advise what the issue could be and how I can fix it, I would be eternally grateful. Issues I have discovered along the way that may help with analysis:
Link Explorer | | g3mmab
My site has many 404s (hundreds) - all relate to urls of old images that have been removed from the website. The 'Top Hits' on my website are from blogs (some spammy) to these deleted image urls that return a 404. I don't use any plugins. I do get 'duplicate content' notices as my blog posts archive themselves and generate new urls - as an example - 'blog post name' archived December 2023. It may be the case that the old http urls have been redirected to https but I have no warnings for 'redirect issues' in Moz. Thanks for taking the time to read this and thanks in advance for any help.0 -
Unsolved Why am I not seeing search.yahoo.com in my site's backlink profile?
When looking at the backlinks for a client's competitor I found that they had a backlink on search.yahoo.com/reviews and our domain (harmonyhit.com) did not. I was using the Link Explorer tool. However, when I go to yahoo Search I see that the website of harmonyhit.com is indexed in Yahoo search and has links to the site. Also, it's sitemap has been recently crawled in Bing webmaster tools which Yahoo uses. Why does our client have the backlink accounted for and we do not?
Link Explorer | | DigitalThirdCoast0 -
My backlinks are not indexing , Added in the link tracking list too
I have waited for three days to index my backlinks on moz but still they are not indexed in moz backlink index 😞 How to index backlinks in moz so that I can track all are ok ?
Link Explorer | | esdda81111 -
How do you check for .gov and .edu backlinks using the new link explorer?
I'm trying to do an audit but I can't seem to figure out how to find .edu and .gov backlinks from the new link explorer. Can someone please help? I'm trying to learn how as open site explorer will be replaced by the link explorer. Thank you!
Link Explorer | | AFARiva1 -
Open Site Explore page titles show as "No Title"
This has been asked many times but I cannot find an answer. On Open Site Explorer, most URLs I enter show as "No title" which means you have to hover over the URL to see which page is being referred to. I know you'd want an example, so here's your own site Moz.com 🙂 CWrkxZQ
Link Explorer | | clifra0 -
Crawling and Links - Showing Links
Hello I have a campaign in Moz that shows a new site as having no domain authority and no links. The site does have links to it, but they don't show up on OSE. Does Moz count links in the comments section of blogs (or is this counted as social, when the commenting system is one that requires facebook login?) I know blog comments are not great for SEO, I just use them when the post/link is 100% genuinely relevant. The site does have actual links on websites not just comment links, so it isn't showing any type of link. What is the best way to see the links the site has? Thanks!
Link Explorer | | wearehappymedia1 -
Why doesn't my site show up in Moz Site Explorer
I started this website about 2 months ago, www.guyetteroofing.com. I know it still needs a lot of work, but I can't find any information on it on the site explorer tool.
Link Explorer | | billyguyette1 -
Open Site Explorer Recently Discovered Links Question
Hey Mozzers, I have a question regarding the Open Site Explorer Recently Discovered Links. I know that I have receive follow link from a few sites that have more DA than my site. I am wondering why it is taking so long for OSE to discover these links? I double checked the sites to make sure that they don't have NOFOLLOW (sorry for the double negative), and the sites have linked to my site for over a month now. Any ideas? I'm not concerned about it because Search Engines have discovered those links. I am just curious why this is, or if it is normal. Cheers!
Link Explorer | | evan890