How can I get links indexed in Just Discovered Links, or Open site Explorer? (Because it aint Bit.ly or Feedly!)

[stevestretton1]

Dear Moz & Forum,

I've been on a bit of a merry-go-round with one of my clients.  He knows enough about SEO to ask questions, and one thing he likes is to see the links that we are building inside Open Site Explorer.

Now, of course we know that it takes a while for links to show, but that was ok, because we could just plug the links that we've built into a bit.ly link and then they'd show under Just Discovered Links in Open Site Explorer, and then boom, we're happy.

It stopped working some time ago, and after the support team were a little unstuck I sent a hopeful tweet to @randfish.  Here is the response: https://twitter.com/randfish/status/788412272129347584

The advice to use Bit.Ly was removed swiftly after this!  Oops!

The current Guidance is here: https://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/open-site-explorer/justdiscovered

It says:

Want to see your new link in the Just-Discovered Links tab?

An easy way to start seeing your link in the Just-Discovered section is to have it shared on Twitter and available on Feedly link.

Feedly stopped supporting their own link shortner a few years ago.  Also, when you share a link from Feedly on twitter it is just the same as sharing a normal tweet, because it shares the standard URL for the site not a link to view on Feedly.

Or, maybe these two statements are independant of one another and they should both be done separately?  I've done that too!

I've also added the feed to recommended feeds inside fresh web explorer and that didn't work either!

So, Moz and Help team please help me!

How can I get links I've built for clients into Just Discovered Links?

Thank you!

[stevestretton1]

Hi Tawny,

Thank you for the thorough answer.  I think you'll need to update that section I quoted.. again..!

For the record, that's a real shame.  It's now a case of myself and others like me educating clients to use different tools.

Good luck!

Steve

[tawnycase]

Hey there, Steve!

I've just talked to the engineers who work on Open Site Explorer and Just-Discovered Links, and I can give you a bit of an update on our data sources, since our partnership with bit.ly has ended.

Currently, the only sources for JDL are some tweets, which we get through our Followerwonk credentials, and the feeds that go into Fresh Web Explorer. Unfortunately, that means that there's currently no guaranteed way of making sure your links end up in the Just-Discovered Links section of the tool. The tweets are a probabilistic sample, so something that's tweeted enough times by the right people would show up in that section eventually, but it's not a guarantee, and currently there's no way to gauge how long it would take to show up in that section.

I hope that helps to clarify - I'm sorry that I don't have an answer for how to get your links into that section!