MOZ can't find internal links on my website while Google search console finds thousands of them

[NathanPetralia]

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

[imovecrc]

Here's the answer I received. I have to say, I still don't get it. On the site I manage we have internal links in the body of many articles, side widgets, footer, HTML sitemap, Related Content, and so on. Yet MOZ has us -- constantly -- at 66 internal links.

Here's the MOZ answer I received to my question about this:

I think it may help to understand a bit more about how our index is built. Our index doesn't work like a direct crawler that you'll see with Screamingfrog, or Moz Pro Site Crawl. Direct site crawlers go right to your site and crawl from page to page using links. This would give you an accurate picture of your site at the time it's crawled.

Our index is built by crawling and indexing high authority sites and pages and following links internally and externally. If we find a link to a site we may not go on to crawl and index all the other pages on that site. It's likely we won't have a complete map of all your pages and internal links.

The index and Link Explorer tool are designed to help you discover prospects to build your backlink profile, rather than give you a complete picture of your internal links. The higher your pages authority to more likely they are to be crawled and indexed.

You can learn more about our index here https://moz.com/help/guides/link-explorer/how-we-index

[seoteam_ionline]

Yes having the same issue here, and support gave me the same response... You would think there support would be better for the amount you pay.

[imovecrc]

I'm curious about this too, but the answer above is to a whole other question. The question wasn't about backlinks, it was about internal links counted by Moz.

[NathanPetralia]

Hi, thanks for the very fast response! My main concern is that MOZ actually shows 0 (zero) internal links inside our website... I thought it to be a crawling issue but upon checking Google Search Console it quickly shows it has nothing to do with our index because Google Search Console shows them all!

So if I am to understand it correct

1. Google Search Console shows ALL links no matter what the link value is of those because its spider will display ALL on our Google Search Console.
2. AHRefs, like MOZ will start filtering out less valuable links but still will show more results as MOZ, yet less as Google itself because MOZ link value algorithm is matching page rank more closely so it will ignore links without page rank value.
3. MOZ then is the strictest of all and will not show any links that contain no added value for the page rank / seo for that website.

So concluded from your reply I understand our internal links would start to improve once our DA reaches a significant number.

[samantha.chapman]

Hey there!

Sam from Moz's Help Team here!

This is definitely due to the way we collect this information for our link index and it is actually expected that we won’t find every page and link because we aren’t looking for them all! When we collect this data, we’re looking specifically for the most valuable links and, rather than crawling your entire site or every site, we collect this by starting our crawler on a few highest ranking sites and letting it perform a breadth first search to see what it finds.

For each page that we crawl, we first collect each of it’s links before following these and collecting the details of each page that these link to and so on. There’s a set limit of links that we’ll crawl per page and pages that we’ll crawl per site so it’s expected that we may not follow every link on your site (or any site) this way.

Open Site Explorer and the Link Analysis page of campaigns are both tied to our Mozscape index, which tends to update roughly once a month.

Just a few points on how we compile our index:

• We grab the most recent index.
• We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains).
• We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled ~130 billion URLs

The idea here is that we're focusing on the highest-quality links we can find, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we're aiming to report the most valuable ones available!

Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many reasons - including the crawl-ability of sites, the number of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories.

You can see our most recently updated schedule here as well as some more technical metrics on our Mozscape API Updates page. You can also see when the last and next updates happened on the Open Site Explorer (OSE) homepage at any time.

Since Moz focuses on quality of links over quantity, we are always focused on the most relevant links to display to our users. It's possible that Moz's index will leave out some of the lower-quality (non-link juice providing) links out of our index because of this. So, that might explain why you may see some discrepancies with what other tools may be showing.

Generally, we recommend using a wide variety of backlink tools to get the most illustrative picture of how your site's backlink profile looks. OSE and Ahrefs index differently and have different purposes. Ahrefs is good for quantity while OSE is great for finding higher quality links. Domain Authority is our own proprietary metric that is closely correlated to Google rankings, so our customers often use OSE to research influential sites to build links.

I hope this helps - let me know if you have any further questions!