Discrepancy in Competitive Link Analysis?
-
I currently have a campaign set-up that monitors a few competitors compared to our site. When I look at the Root Domain Metrics I see that Company A has 2,053 total external links, and Company B has 1,632 total external links.
I wanted to view these links in more detail so I ran Advanced Inbound Links reports. The reports returned 432 results for Company A and 693 results for Company B.
Shouldn't these numbers match up with each other, or am I missing something?
Also, I noticed that in the Inbound Links analysis for my competitors there are a number of results listed that are not actually inbound links, but are internal links from there own site.
Is there a reason these are appearing?
I am having problems because I am trying to use this campaign to show the improvements in our site vs our competitors. However, OSE shows dramatically fewer total external links for our site (about 260 vs 3200 in Webmaster Tools) and I cannot tell if the competitor data is accurate?
Thanks
-
I don't want to be rude, but my original question has not been answered. Any thoughts?
-
Awesome. I'd figured that it might be the internal links.
-
Erica,
Thanks for taking the time to respond to this question. Unfortunately, one question still remains unanswered. I understand the limitations of OSE, and I can live with that for now.
However, I still do not get why the root domain metrics for my competitors show significantly more "total external links" than the Advanced Inbound Link report I ran. I do not believe this has to do with filters, especially since OSE is reporting **fewer **links when I run the advanced report.
It might be that I just don't understand the terminology, which is what I am trying to figure out. What is the difference between Total External Links that I see in Competitive Domain Analysis for a campaign and the Advanced Inbound Link report analysis for the same domain? Since the numbers are different I assume the terms are not the same, but I do not understand why.
EDIT - I figured out the internal links showing up issue, they are actually from a different language version of the companies site so they show up as www.example.de linking to www.example.com.
Thanks
-
OSE has filters on it that you can use to include or discard internal links. Check out those filters and see how they're set. Default includes internal links and also no-follow links. Depending on what info you're looking for.
OSE's data is populated with our Linkscape crawler. We do this so we can have the best data possible and try to only crawl quality links. Read more about our latest updated that included 58 billion URLs. That said, we do not crawl as many links as Google, so we do not report as much. However, by trying to crawl the best data out there instead of everything, we stand by our competitor comparison as the only backlinks we're not picking up compared to Google are low-value ones. No crawler -- even Google -- picks up every single backlink to your site.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Competitors' paid search analysis tool
Hi, What tool will do the following: will tell me paid keywords our competitors are using. Ideally, I could narrow down by country. Thanks. Katarina
Competitive Research | | Katarina-Borovska0 -
Keyword strategy for wordpress category base blog in competitive industry
Hi friends, We have a client in the movie review blog industry, which we are aware is highly competitive, but we have tons of content (over 10,000 unique posts) and a good team of reviewers for fresh content. I was wondering about any input on keyword variations for our SEO Title of our wordpress main categories, like "Movie Reviews". I was thinking a modification to "Latest Movie Reviews", but the competition is only slightly less, and still seems questionable for attaining eventual rankings. "Best Movie Reviews" is slightly higher than "Latest Movie Reviews" but the competition still seems tough. What would be a good long term strategy with these category pages, any suggestions?
Competitive Research | | JustinMurray0 -
Rankings & Linking Root Domains
How are the Linking Root Domains under Keyword Rankings being found? We've noticed for many of our key terms that big brands like Amazon, eBay, Home Depot, etc. only list 1 linking root domain, while much smaller competitors in our industry have hundreds. Clearly big brands are going to get more links than a company most people haven't heard of and the idea that these companies only have 1 linking root domain to a specific subcategory on their site is not believable. What's going on here?
Competitive Research | | Kingof50 -
Why such a difference in external followed links details?
I love using seomoz and have done for a few years. I am no SEO expert, but like to think I can get away with making out I know what I'm on about! I use opensiteexplorer regualrly and usually enjoy delving deeper into it's metrics, but one thing is bothering me (before I start with this, please forgive me if I am missing something obvious - you may have to point it out in your answer!) So I run a comparison of a few sites and pay attention to the external followed links section. On checking this number at root domain level, company A has 12,666 external followed links. So I want to dig a little deeper as to the qulaity of those links and click along to the inbound links tab, here I select the following: "followed & 301" > "only external" > "all links to this root domain" > leaving the results ungrouped Downloading this table I only have results for 3,416 links - why such a big difference to the previous 12,666 or am I missing something here? Would just like a bit of clarification 🙂
Competitive Research | | iThinkMedia0 -
As anyone used this before the hoth for Links building???
http://www.thehoth.com Links building company Is it safe or waste of money
Competitive Research | | spidersite1 -
Link Analysis Tool
Does anyone have/use any really good link analysis tools? I have been using SEOmoz open site explorer but don't find it that indepth or find that many links. I don't mind paying once the link analysis tool is good and I can export links to excell. I was thinking of buying this software http://www.link-assistant.com/features-and-editions.html Cheers,
Competitive Research | | Socialdude0 -
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 -
Inbound links
Is the any report that will show the reciprocal vs one-way inbound links?
Competitive Research | | FastCashOnlineInc0