SEOmoz total links fluxuations
-
I'm analyzing my clients and competitor back links and are noticing alot of up and down fluxuations. For example last month we had 1400 back links, last week 1350 back links, and today 1450 back links. Also, one competitor went from 25,000 to 2,700 in the space of a few weeks.
My question is how can I explain to the client that their back links are going down when they are paying for a back link building service (100 back links per month).
Thank you for your time.
-
Mathew, maybe that competitor got some links showing at the homepage/blogroll/all pages in a domain because it was a recent post or whatever, and when they've updated it, the 99% of the links are gone. Temporal issues like that one can also be seen at the webmaster tools also.
maybe it's some kind of error of the seomoz tool, dunno, but just a thought too
-
That is a great question Matthew. Unfortunately, I do not know the answer. I would recommend reaching out to the SEOmoz help desk, as it pertains to the detailed mechanics of how their tool works.
-
Thanks for your quick response.
One thing I just noticed was the competition site that lost 20,000 links has also recently updated their website with new content and new urls. This would probably cause a lot of those links to return 404 errors. If those 404 error back links were 301 redirected (eg. with .htaccess file) would the Linkscape crawler still pick up those back links?
-
The links which appear in Open Site Explorer are based upon the Linkscape crawl of the internet. Prior to July 25th, the links shown in OSE were appearing normal.
On July 25th Linkscape was updated and there were numerous issues which affected some data. Not all of the links appeared, and some erroneous links appeared. Today the Linkscape index was updated and hopefully all is well again. Everything appears to be correct for my sites.
Your client should also understand that it can take up to 2 months for a link to appear in the Linkscape index.
Furthermore, the Linkscape crawl only captures the top 25% of web pages. If you have a single website with a footer or other site wide link which isn't captured because it was removed, or because the site's ranking lowered to where they are no longer in the top 25%, that can cause a huge fluctuation in your link profile numbers. I would suggest use the number of linking domains, not the total number of links.
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
-
How to approach link building/content in my weight loss coaching niche in a large scale way
Hello, I run a weight loss coaching business, bobweikel.com that is in it's early stages. I'm still working on making it graphically appealing I want to increase my number of national clients - it's coaching done over the phone or skype. I'm needing help analyzing my niche, specifically keywords, article content topics, link building tactics. I want to put a lot of time into it. Eventually I want to scale it up and hire other weight loss coaches and even SEO help. How do I get this dream going through gaining national clients online? There's not much traffic locally. I'm enough of an authority that, with enough time, I can create kickass content on the topics of weight loss and also the topic of NLP (NLP is the type of coaching I do, but it's little known) I'd like to add 5 best-of-the-web articles and a blog. Looking for advice. Would like to dream big. Tools I normally use (though I'm open to anything): OSE, Link Prospector, Excel Pivot Tables, Buzzstream, iPhone 5S video camera with tripod, youtube video embed, keyword discovery
Competitive Research | | BobGW0 -
Creating Free Website Accounts (Weebly, Wix, Wordpress.com, etc) for Linking Purposes?
Greetings Mozzers, I came a cross several sites and when looking at their link profile I found they had several links from these free services to gain links. Obviously duplicate content is bad, but if all the content on each one was completely unique, would these links be of quality? Let's say, 1 link per site that is external to your site. I know it's a tricky topic but just wanted thoughts, would the above be a potentially beneficial method for gaining a simple quality link. Your advice and information is much appreciated!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Help link building
Í am looking for a good company to help me on high cuality link building . Please can someone give any recommendations of good seo companies
Competitive Research | | maestrosonrisas0 -
What's the difference between 'external links' and 'linking domains to this domain' in my report?
I'm looking at a competitor analysis report. The number provided for 'external links' is 150. The number for 'external links to this domain' is 4860 and 'linking domains to this domain' is 232. What are the differences between these numbers?
Competitive Research | | lthompsonon0 -
How does the timeline look for the next Competitive Link Analysis? Thanks!
Hello, Just wanted to see if there was an update on the horizon. The last update on my campaign shows 2/28/12. Am I not setting updates correctly on my dashboard? Thanks!
Competitive Research | | GRC0 -
Are My Links Valuable?
I have been link building for a couple months now. I am having a hard time trying to figure out which sites are even worthy of getting links from. Obviously, those that are clearly link farming, or have lots of ads throughout their site are not valuable. I use OSE, but don't know what is a good P.A or D.A. and what it means when one is much higher than the other (and if that is a bad thing). I also use compete.com to give me a general idea of the unique visitors going into a site. Any tools I can use to help evaluate the strength of specific incoming links/ specific websites? Any ideas or thoughts would be helpful. Thanks So Much, Melissa
Competitive Research | | SEOneophyte1 -
How does a site get to no 3 in Google with no KW in their links?!!
Hello everyone, my first post - ahhh I'm investigating a niche and there is a site that should have no right being there in my view. It's no. 3 Google UK for 'company formation' with a small site with 65 weak links from only 7 domains and hosted in the US. But more importantly, the Open Site Explorer says there is not 1 link with that term in its anchor text. This I find crazy and makes me suspicious. But before I go back to my client saying "oh they must be black hat" I would like your expert views. I'm not sure whether to tut or congratulate them and for the first time I'm not sure what reasons to give for their amazing performance! What's your views?
Competitive Research | | GOYMedia480 -
Should I pursue this LINK?
I can get a link from this site, but it has a DA=39, Dmr=3.37, Dmt=3.39 and a Page Rank=0
Competitive Research | | b4tv0