Google and Open Site Explorer not showing as many links
-
I've noticed this past week that when you search for the links pointing to a given site, by using the "link:" operator, that Google not showing as many links as they use to.
I noticed this also with Open Site Explorer, it is not showing the detail link information as much as it did before.
Is Google trying to mask what we can view now on competitors backlinks?
If so, how can we see the backlink building that our competitors are doing?
-
Thanks Takeshi.
I am using Open Site Explorer, and notice a drop there too, but realized different results with the addition or exclusion of "www".
I have used the other tools you mentioned. I just wanted to make sure that Google wasn't trying to mask or restrict our access to seeing website's backlinks. That could really hurt our abilities to build backlinks.
Thanks for your input.
-
Google has never really shown an accurate count of backlinks.
Your best bet is to look at 3rd party backlink tools. The top 3 tools are OSE, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs. Each of these indexes the web separately from Google, so can provide information that Google withholds. However, these are all paid tools, and are not comprehensive, but they do a good job of detecting the highest value links.
Another great free tool is the site explorer in Bing Webmaster Tools, which uses Bing's index to identify backlinks.
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
-
ERROR: Too Many on-page links!
User wise, my product menu @LEDSupply.com is user friendly, but I'm concerned that it might be seen by crawlers as bad because of the TOO MANY ON-PAGE LINKS error I am getting in my moz crawl report. Is it really counting all the links in every drop-down menu? If so, is there are resource on how to fix it????
Moz Pro | | saultienut0 -
SEOmoz not showing Google rankings accurately in Ranking Reports. How do we fix this?
We have a running campaign for a client who has rankings show for Yahoo and Bing within the SEOmoz Ranking Reports, however, Google shows no data or rankings. When we manually check from different IP's and computers and browsers, we see our client ranking very well in Google and for keywords which we have inside their campaign for SEOmoz. Can anyone provide insight into this? Have you experienced this also? Our reports would look terrible going to the client if sent from SEOmoz directly as Google shows 0 (Not in Top 50) for all keywords, so we have to get rankings from other sources or manually to show our client. Thank you in advance for your help and tips everyone!
Moz Pro | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Google Webmaster Tools and Open Site explorer's links not matching up
My question is why do my GWT's links not match up to the ones on Open Site Explorer. I watched John Mueller's video, and he said that they had problems with the link counts recently. After checking my links today, I can see that the problem is fixed, but my link count differs from Open Site Explorer. On Web Master Tools I have 307 links, but on Open Site Explore I have 42. Has anyone dealt with this problem? thanks. Peter
Moz Pro | | PeterRota0 -
Open site explorer showing zero backlinks
My new website: http://www.thelifesciencesreport.com/ is showing zero backlinks in Internet Explorer and I know of dozens that have posted our links: to name a few: http://www.pharmainfo.net/merck-news/02/10/2012/platform-technologies-promise-big-payoffs-juan-sanchez http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/296320/20120210/pharmaceuticals-pharma-medicine-platform-technologies-neurobiology-parkinsons-disease.htm http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=NYSE:MRK#
Moz Pro | | StreetwiseReports
http://www.businessinsider.com/platform-technologies-promise-big-payoffs-juan-sanchez-2012-2 http://www.traderwise.com/content/platform-technologies-promise-big-payoffs-juan-sanchez http://silverspotprice.com/
http://www.ihavenet.com/merck.html http://www.wallstreetwindow.com/aggregator/categories/1 any reason this is happening?0 -
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
Moz Pro | | hmunoz0 -
What are no followed links?
Hi there, probably this is so self explaining that I didn't find it described in the tutorial about learning to use PRO or here in Q&Α. But remember, there is no dumb question 🙂 What are the followed vs no followed links? I understand followed links as backlinks to my site, but what is a no followed link? Thank you in advance!
Moz Pro | | polyniki0 -
Site is showing forwarded /301 to another website
My site http://riyas.in is showing a 301 redirect or a forward to http://flicker.com/muhammedriyas . I had done a 301 redirect long before from my site to this domain, but i removed that after 2-3 days. Please help me to solve this problem. I attached a screen shot seomoz1.jpg
Moz Pro | | riyas_0 -
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