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 -
Why moz and ahrefs reported a remove link that is exist?
Hi in last few days I checked my website in moz link explorer and ahrefs and it showed lots of my backlink as removed! But when I checked this on the browser its OK is there any problem with these tools? Anyone has this problem? Thanks
Link Explorer | | namibiagonzo0 -
WP Events Calendar Creates URLs Too Long in Site Crawler
My travel/tourism site is on WP and using an Events plugin that ads a calendar of events to many pages. The MOZ crawler is indexing almost 46K links with a URL too long, but the site only has about 3.8K pages indexed in Google. I can tell MOZ is indexing the same pages over and over again but just adding a random calendar month and year. Here are some examples. https://www.visitcurrituck.com/four-day-stay/?full=1&long_events=1&country[0]=US&ajaxCalendar=1&mo=10&yr=2003 https://www.visitcurrituck.com/four-day-stay/?full=1&long_events=1&country%5B0%5D=US&ajaxCalendar=1&mo=10&yr=2034 https://www.visitcurrituck.com/beach-houses-family-time/?full=1&long_events=1&country%5B0%5D=US&ajaxCalendar=1&mo=1&yr=1873 Any advice on how to prevent MOZ from indexing this way? I don't believe that Google is seeing this also, but maybe they are. I just know my site has over 63K issues and I'm sure at least 75% or more is because of the way they are picking up on the events calendar. Thanks!
Link Explorer | | CinivaAgency1 -
REACT site and sitemap.xml
I have a REACT site www.nettheory.com. MOZ seems to only index the homepage but not all the internally linked pages, even the sitemap.xml is there. The reason I say that is the crawl result only shows the http and https version of the homepage, no other pages mentioned. I also noticed MOZ crawl results point out my content is very thin (<50 words). As a matter of fact, it has a lot more words if the JS runs correctly. Do we know if MOZ crawls REACT or JS based sites correctly?
Link Explorer | | NetTheory-Analysts0 -
How to download full list of internal links properly with OSE?
Hi Moz Community, I am having issues getting a full list of my internal links when I go to the Open Site Explorer. When I export the internal links into excel, I am getting half of my URLs and 80% of what I am getting is absolutely crazy URLs that are super super old. Plus, these old URLs are not even showing in my campaign crawls. So the crawls themselves are different. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated, since I am trying to get a full picture on the internal link structure of my site. Thanks!
Link Explorer | | RyanRhodesGW0 -
MOZ can't find internal links on my website while Google search console finds thousands of them
When using open site explorer MOZ finds 0 internal links on https://www.glassesgallery.com while Google search console finds thousands of internal links. What could the issue be? Cr8Wk14 oGOf1gb
Link Explorer | | NathanPetralia0 -
What does "Number of Linking Root Domains" in Open Site Explorer actually mean?
I've read through the forum, but I'm confused as to what "Number of Linking Root Domains" means in the Linking Domains report. For example, if the root domain is Moz.com and the number is 135,000 does that mean there are 135,000 links from Moz pointing back to my site or does it mean there are 135,000 sites linking back to Moz? Any help is appreciated. Thank you!
Link Explorer | | karrabarron1 -
Why Open Site Explorer is Showing 0 Total Internal Links?
Open Site Explorer is reporting "0" value under "Total Internal Links" as well as "Internal Followed Links" metrics for my website. I have a good interlinking of pages throughout the site.
Link Explorer | | vivekrathore
Is there an issue with OSE (Open Site Explorer) crawler ? OR There are some crawling problems with our Website's structure ?
Can anybody please give an idea or recommendations on this ?1