Hi there! Kristina from Moz's Help Team here.
Hi there! I'm sorry your site isn't showing up in Open Site Explorer yet. I'll try to explain a few reasons why this might be happening:
There are two types of link data we capture: external and internal linking pages. In order for us to discover backlinks to your site, we need to crawl the sites and pages linking to you. Once we can find those links, we will then be able to crawl your site to find pages you link to and so forth.
If you don't see any inbound links from external sites, there are a few things to check real quick:
- Check your URL for typos or other errors. Did your URL cut off or contain the wrong punctuation?
- Check out the site's navigation. Sometimes it takes multiple index updates for us to discover pages that aren't linked to from the site's primary navigation. One simple fix is to create a link to the URL from another page on the website.
- The Mozscape index is still growing! Keep in mind that, while large, our index doesn’t cover the entire web. If you have a smaller site, it’s possible we haven’t crawled the domains linking to it. Search the pages linking to yours to see if we have indexed their links. If you need help with link building, we've got a fabulous guide here: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building.
If you don't see any internal links to your page:
Make sure we're not blocked from crawling this URL or site. If our web crawlers are blocked from crawling certain pages (i.e., with "noindex" or Robots.txt), they may not be included in the index.
For some more in-depth info, here's 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 90,000,000,000 pages (which is about 35% the amount in Google's index).
So, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index.
Other tools, such as Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, and Majestic will alway show more link data as they target the quantity of links, while OSE focuses more on quality and Domain Authority. It’s best to use all the tools you can to obtain a full backlink profile; I've got a post here that details why and how that is: http://www.seobook.com/comparing-backlink-data-providers
Mozscape focuses on a breadth-first approach. Therefore we almost always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages, and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.
We update once a month and you can view the next scheduled update here: http://moz.com/products/api/updates
Hope this helps provide some clarity. Please let me know if you have any questions!