Any SEO moz users notice a HUGE change in OSE (Open Site Explorer) link data numbers?
-
Hi All,
I am having some serious concern with OSE data recently for numerous clients, one client I want to talk about today has the following data from OSE for the month of August 2011 compared with July 2011:
Total links to the domain: (decrease of around 100,000+)
External Followed links: (decrease by around 5,000)
**Linking Root domains: (decrease of over 60) **The crazy thing is that the domain authority has actually gone up by around 5 points for this client even though every thing has suddenly gone down?
Also funny thing is we have been link building quite strong for this client over the last 12 months using only high quality sources from out niche.
I am worried that their is serious issues with the data, I realise we saw some updates to OSE recently yet I am suprised it can be this drastic.
Kind Regards.
PSV
-
This topic affects everyone and Rand offered a specific reply to address these concerns. In short, they are working on the issue but there is only an opportunity to make adjustments once per month. Then the crawler is set to do it's job and the results wont be seen for another month.
The crawler has to go out and pull data from literally billions of web pages. The data then needs to be processed which takes 1-2 weeks. The team is also trying to improve the quality of the tool as well. My recommendation is to use OSE as a guide, not a solid list of all links.
-
Almost 2 months later from last post (Sep 5) here and I am wondering why this problem with OSE is not rectified??? Oh yea, here's another $100. Thanks so much!!?
-
Hey PSV,
Sorry I'm jumping in so late to the game on this! The response from the Customer Service team by Kenny below is correct - with the adjustments we've made to the new crawler, we're going less deep this crawl than we did in the July crawl. This is because we're still trying to make tweaks to get the domain diversity back up to what is what before. It looks like you had a major change from July to August which is strange - I haven't seen such a drastic change pointed out by any other users.
If I could get the actual domain, I can look into this for you. Is this discrepancy being reported by Open Site Explorer or are you querying the API directly?
It's hard to speculate without knowing which domain you're referring to, but you may see a decrease in inbound links if you had a lot of links from a high MozRank page. If you had a large amount of links on one domain and we didn't crawl that domain as deeply this past index where we went MUCH deeper the index before, many of the links deeper down in the domain won't be in this latest index.
Please let me know which domain you're referring to and I can try to track down some information for you!
Thanks,
Cairn
-
I have seen the same thing and posted a private Q along the same lines, having seen substantial changes with a couple of site profiles, both of which have had link building done very carefully with high value sources. Majestic and Google WMT still show the links - just a spanner in the works at the mozplex by the look of things until the next crawl.
Response as follows:
| Kenny Martin | Aug 31, 2011 |
| Customer Service Expert at SEOmoz |Sorry that you're seeing such drastic changes with the new Linkscape update. We've been adjusting the way that we do our crawls over the past couple of months, and the updates made in July were a bit off the mark. Our new crawler was built to be fresher, but it was going deeper into domains, and, unfortunately, not visiting as many domains. Domains with a high MozRank were getting crawled deeper, but domains with middle to lower MozRanks were not getting crawled. With our newer Index, we tried to get the domain diversity back up to or better than that of our last update (as was originally designed) so we didn't crawl as deeply into some of these higher ranking domains as we had for our July index.
Also, keep in mind that it can take some time for links to be included in our Linkscape index because it takes a few weeks to crawl the web and a couple weeks to process all the data that is acquired.
I hope that helps clear things up and we are anticipating on improving our crawler and index each month. My apologies for any inconveniences
-
I'm sorry PSV, I missed the 60 root domain information which you clearly included.
100,000/60 = 1667 so it sounds like some if not most of the links lost may have been site wide links. It's impossible to tell with this information alone. There are too many factors involved:
-
how many domains are linking to your site
-
which domains did you lose? Were they high DA sites or low?
-
which links did you lose? Were they foot links? Links in content? Links from high/low PA pages?
-
were they links to your home page or deep links?
-
did the links use anchor text or simply provide a URL?
-
How is your site's traffic? Have you noticed any recent changes?
-
How many total domains link to the site?
Do you save your links in Excel or have a tool to compare your current links with the past links so you can determine which ones have been lost? This step is key to understanding how to approach the change.
-
-
Hence why I noted 60 root domains loss, which I find a bit weird, as our other software shows gains.
I thought it must have been down to a system update!!
But yeah easy as to get a footer link a partner site footer, but it is not quality
-
Hi Nigel,
Yes we are using several tools for comparison currently we do not limit our selves to only SEOmoz data. I read Rands post about the link scape update, saying how lower quality smaller sites were removed from the OSE index yet this site we deal with has more high quality links in its profile.
-
I agree with Nigel's assessment and would add one thought. Look a lot closer at the number of linking domains, not the total number of links.
You can add a single footer link to a forum site with 100k pages. The link's value is minimal but you would notice 100k more links. What can you do with that information? Very little. It distorts your true backlink profile. If you were to lose that footer link but add 1 quality link from a source such a the New York Times, your sites DA may increase even though you are technically down 99,999 links.
-
I saw similar changes to the Data sets in the August update. I received feedback from moz, was that with the July data set they were crawling deeper into some of the larger (and more trusted) domains which was, in some cases, producing unusual results. For example, we had links coming from domains such as Warnerbros.com, which have no trace of a link to us.
I think the latest update has moved to rectify these issues but at the same time crawled a wider range of results giving a more accurate picture of link graphs for pages. I would suggest that comparing Data month and month to yourself is not a useful as mapping the changes your competitors are having i.e. with Seomoz making the great changes they do to make their metrics reflective of what matters in the SERPs the data will change month on month but if you are looking at how your competitors shift as well you'll get an idea as to how you perform.
I would also suggest using several tools, (whilst linkscape is pretty darn awesome) it's always worth getting a full picture of the link metrics by checking linking domains in webmaster tools, yahoo site explorer, bing tools, majestic seo etc.
In short I don't think there are serious issues with the data but it would be worth checking which domains you've lost and which you've gained, just to be safe.
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
-
Fresh Web Explorer explorer doesnt seem to work properly
How do I get Fresh Web Explorer explorer to work properly. The feedback I’m getting shows that my brand, Health 2000 had over 4000 mentions on Monday the 13th of January. However when I check out the links that supposedly mention our brand, they bring up general terms related to Health and make no reference to our brand. How can I refine this?
Moz Pro | | Hardley1110 -
Is there any way to get Moz to generate a regular (e.g. weekly) report of new links to my domain, automatically?
I want to know when new people link to my domain. I do not want to log in once a week and use a complex interface to figure this out, I want it in my inbox every week. Is there a way to get Moz to do this? (I am a PRO user) Cheers, Daniel
Moz Pro | | swombat0 -
Open Site Explorer Twitter Stats
Hi, I have just noticed something within Open Site Explorer. On the page it says it draws the Twitter stats from tweetmeme. I have just noticed that tweetmeme have shut down. Their new product datasift seems to do the same thing, but can someone confirm if SEOMoz is drawing data from them now, or is the current twitter data shown not fully up to date. Its not a major issue, its just something I noticed. Thanks Rich
Moz Pro | | mos_rich0 -
Competitive Link Analysis not showing links.
Hate asking such a vague question, but my SEOMoz link analysis report is not showing any backlinks for a client of mine. I loaded the information the same way I did my other clients, which show all links. www.domain.com is being forwarded properly to domain.com. I know there are backlinks because I put many of them there myself over the last couple of months. Clearly this is affecting my Moz score. Not sure how to troubleshoot this. Can anyone offer suggestions? Grazie mille! Regards, Dino
Moz Pro | | Dino640 -
How can I get a report of the top 500 national sites using Domain Authority and Page Authority? Does someone have to type sites in one by one on Site Explorer or is there another way?
I want to know what sites and blogs have the to rankings overall based on their Domain Authority and Page Authority - Top 500 - 1000 in nation - I want to know which ones are follow and no-follow too - Does anyone know? Has anyone run such a report yet? Thanks for help - BD
Moz Pro | | creativeguy0 -
Quote "There is no SEO software that can help optimize a site"
Hi all I am a developer for a small agency in the UK. I am using SEOmoz for a couple of our clients and I am also using it to learn from. So far I am finding it a great tool and this forum is also incredibly helpful. Now I also visit another forum called HighRankings.com and this months newsletter is a list of points that are defined as "SEO Mistakes". In it, point number 2 reads: "Repeat after me: There is no specific number of times a keyword phrase should be used in my content. There is no magic number of words that my pages should have written on them. And there is no best number of words or phrases that belong in a Title tag. And most of all: There is no SEO software that can optimize my website (despite the claims of their creators). Use your common sense to optimize your site! Learn how your target audience searches for products, services and information such as yours, and write about it accordingly on your website. Then write to make an emotional connection with your visitors so that they'll convert into happy customers." Now as a user of SEOmoz I wondered what others thought of this comment? Many thanks for reading. Kris
Moz Pro | | yousayjump0 -
Internal links not showing in Open Site Explorer
So I'm working on a law firm site and looking at the links for pages in OSE. For practice areas, the links to each practice area are in the left hand menu on every page of the site. Can anyone help me with this question: Example: http://www.comitzlaw.com/personal-injury/car-accidents.html When I plug this URL into OSE, it only shows one linking page, www.comitzlaw.com/practice-areas.html, yet there is a link to this on every other page in the site. When I plug in a random competitors page, www.lesagelblaw.com/Personal-Injury-Overview/Car-Accidents.shtml, it does show all the internal pages linking to it. Since I'm not using a flash menu or javascript, any ideas as to why no internal links are showing up in OSE? Even when I plug in the main URL for the home page, it only shows 4 other internal pages linking to it, yet there is a link on every page. What am I doing wrong?
Moz Pro | | c2g0 -
When does Open Site Explorer automatically follow a redirect?
Does anyone know what determines when Open Site Explorer will ask if you meant to type in the redirected URL or when it will automatically change the URL to the www version. example of a site I get asked the redirect question: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons.html?site=checkbook.org Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.checkbook.org/. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>? example of a site that redirects automatically: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons.html?site=healthleap.com
Moz Pro | | irvingw1