Link Diagnosis and Open Site Explorer
-
I work at a web design firm that's starting to offer SEO to its clients. They want to keep costs down until the SEO side becomes more established, so I've been using mostly free tools to do the SEO. I've been using a website called LinkDiagnosis.com to check backlinks for clients. It says the data is provided by SEOmoz, so I thought it must be pretty reliable. However, I just signed up for the PRO trial to test out all of SEOmoz's tools (& hopefully convince my company to sign us up), and I find that the link information between the 2 tools can be vastly different! Sometimes the number of unique linking domains is very close, but other times it can be off by hundreds, even thousands, with Open Site Explorer typically providing the higher numbers.
Is the Link Diagnosis tool really powered with data from SEOmoz, or does it just receive a portion of the data, since it's a free tool? I'm just trying to figure out what will be the most reliable solution for me to keep using, and the discrepancies between the two tools has caused me to question the reliability of both.
Thanks,
Hector
-
SEOmoz provides an API of it's Linkscape data that other companies, even individuals can use for their own purposes. Oftentimes companies buy this data and use it in their own reports. Sometimes they use all of the data, sometimes just a portion of it.
Unfortunately, there's no good way for me to tell how Link Diagnosis uses the SEOmoz data. To save money and resources, some companies "cache" the data - which works fine as long as they update the cache regularly. I'm not saying this to disparage Link Diagnosis, I simply don't know enough about them.
That said, you can be assured that Open Site Explorer always has the latest, freshest and most accurate OSE data. Every time you use OSE, fresh data is served with no long-term caching, so it proves itself a very reliable tool for webmasters.
-
I dont see how you would question the validity of OSE in that scenario
OSE data does change from month to month based on the data from the crawl, maybe LD uses older data? or maybe you are seeing the same data presented with different segments applied - are you looking at exactly the same data?
Just pay for OSE
If you want to do seo, you need the toolsS
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
-
A single metric to evaluate link quality?
We're using Moz and Ahrefs to monitor backlinks that we're getting to Siftery. Given that there are so many factors that affect the potential quality of a backlink - domain authority, page authority, context, anchor text, etc. - is there a single metric that attempts to quantify the value of a link? I realize that this would be an inexact science, but it would be a helpful view to get a quick directional sense of what are our most valuable backlinks (and be able to tie it to the campaigns that led to them, for example). If there's no "single metric" out there, are there heuristics that people have withstood the test of time? Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Moz Spam Analysis vs. GWMT Links to Your Site
Hi Moz Community, I have been conducting some link auditing and started comparing the Moz Spam Analysis tool with the links provided in Google WMT. It appears that the Moz Spam Analysis tools shows an aggregate of links that Moz may or may not consider spam, however when you download and look at Google's "Links to Your Site" list it provides every link iteration known to man that's pointing to the target website - without providing any hints as to whether or not a link may be considered spam by Google. The biggest concern I have here is that Google is picking up a lot of links, which I consider spam, that do not appear in the Moz Spam Analysis results. I guess the question(s) I have are: Does it make sense to compare these two data sets? Has anyone else tried this comparison and how did you use the information to make positive changes? Any recommendations when it comes to determining if an external link is spam/hurting/helping a website? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | GoogleDowner0 -
Cleaning Up Bad 301 External Links From Old Site
A relatively new site I'm working on has been hit really hard by Panda, due to over optimization of 301 external links which include exact keyword phrases, from an old site. Prior to the Panda update, all of these 301 redirects worked like a charm, but now all of these 301's from the old url are killing the new site, because all the hyper-text links include exact keyword matches. A couple weeks ago, I took the old site completely down, and removed the htaccess file, removing the 301's and in effect breaking all of these bad links. Consequently, if one were to type this old url, you'd be directed to the domain registrar, and not redirected to the new site. My hope is to eliminate most of the bad links, that are mostly on spammy sites, that aren't worth linking to. My thought is these links would eventually disappear from G. My concern is that this might not work, because G won't re-index these links, because once they're indexed by G, they'll be there forever. My fear is causing me to conclude I should hedge my bets, and just disavow these sites using the disavow tool in WMT. IMO, the disavow tool is an action of last resort, because I don't want to call attention to myself, since this site doesn't have a manual penalty inflected on it. Any opinions or advise would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | alrockn0 -
OK Crawl Test Link Question Again!
I've downloaded a crawl test and column G Link Count reads 62 and yep there are a total of 62 links on the page in question. Column AM Internal Links reads 303 and yep there are somewhere in the order of 303 pages pointing at this one. Root Domains is surprisingly low at 6, so maybe there are only 6 domains linking to this page. BUT... External Links read 51. There are not 51 links pointing away from this domain on this page, no way hozay, so can anybody tell me what is meant by 'External Links? A humble thank you in anticipation of an education. Jem
Moz Pro | | JemRobinson0 -
How can competition outrank you if your site has better Domain/Page Authority, More links, and More Social sharing?
Say you have a site that has better Domain/page authority, more links, more social media sharing, and a lot more indexed pages (thanks to blogging) than the competition. Of course all of these metrics are based off of data from SEOMoz open site explorer tool which I am not sure if it produces accurate data. 1. Other than exact match domains or the age of a domain what would be other reasons why competition would outrank you? 2. Can anyone suggest other ways to help increase a sites domain/page authority besides creating more indexed pages, link building, etc..?
Moz Pro | | webestate0 -
Compare link metrics - What time frame is this in?
Hi, I'm comparing three sites and one of them I know is quite popular however a few of the social statistics are puzzling me; they've got a small amount of Facebook likes and times shared on twitter - Which just can't be right if it's all time. What's the time frame of this data? The last three months or? Thanks, Dan
Moz Pro | | Sparkstone0 -
Reg. internal followed links
Our site is new. So far we have a 534 pages. Our competitors have around 5000. I'm working on building more, but that's a lot of catching up. The report says we have only 174 internal followed links. Why is that? I have all links set in the site to be nofollow links, but not the inside links. I also have lots of landing pages, which are not added to the main menu, obviously. But the the main menu shows up on all landing pages. Just wondering if either the nofollow has anything to do with it or the landing pages set up, or the numbers are accurate. Any ideas? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | FinanceSite0 -
What is domain linking and linking root domains?
Hey guys! I am proud to be a new SEOMOZ Pro member! I ran the report on my site and it says what I am primarily missing is domain linking.... What is this? it says I only have 3 of them for the specific term / subpage I am going after. In addition what does Linking Root Domains mean in my report? Thanks much!
Moz Pro | | shandaman1