Discrepancy between OSE internal links and Webmaster Tools
-
Hi,
We have been attempting to increase our rankings for our key term for a number of months now, and we are seeing an unusual discrepancy between OSE and Webmaster Tools that we believe may be causing us harm.
OSE shows our homepage, www.unionroom.com, as having only 27 internal links (only three of these aren't 301's too), whereas Webmaster Tools is showing just over 1,500 internal links to the homepage.
The three pages that OSE are displaying as linking back to the homepage are the homepage, our blog and our accessibility page. These pages are all ran off the same template and have the same header and footer (with three home links spread across header and footer). You can see our confusion!
Is this a case of OSE's stats being incorrect (the website has been live for ~6 months) or is there an issue with our in-linking structure that we are missing?
Thanks!
-
Yep that is correct, which can be 50/50.
-
Thanks for the link David, we will take a look through that.
I've quickly looked at some competitor websites and their home links are all href="/", so would I be correct in assuming that it if this affected our website it should also affect others in OSE?
-
To provide more detail there is a relative link back to the homepage though href="/" which our crawler doesn't work well with so having the full absolute path is recommended.
Here is a great resource that goes more in-depth about the differences: http://www.coffeecup.com/help/articles/absolute-vs-relative-pathslinks/
-
I ran some inner pages through OSE (/work and /contact) and both look to be indexed.
It's weird that you say 'For example we do have /blog/ indexed but there isn't a link going back to the homepage as "www.unionroom.com"' as this is one of only two pages (blog and accessibility) showing that DO link back to unionroom.com.
In summary:
- All inner pages are crawled.
- All inner pages (that we have tested) are indexed.
- All of our pages use the same template.
- OSE is stating that only two inner pages link back to the homepage (blog and accessibility).
-
It's possible we may not have indexed those pages or they have a link back to www.unionroom.com within the source code. You can verify by putting those pages into OSE directly to see if they have been indexed and also verify the link is in the source code.
For example we do have /blog/ indexed but there isn't a link going back to the homepage as "www.unionroom.com"
-
The crawl looks to be working correctly, as in it is finding all of the pages and posts that we would expect (approximately 300). It looks to be solely an issue with the number of internal links that OSE is saying the page www.unionroom.com has (27).
All but two of our inner pages, aside from the blog and accessibility, aren't listed on our internal link report for the homepage. This includes top level pages like services, about, contact etc, all missing.
The templates that we use for the blog and accessibility pages are identical to to what we use for other inner pages, so it's unusual that the others aren't listed.
-
Anytime!
Website structure can play a part but also time timing of when sites are indexed. There can be various networking issues that can prevent our crawler and others from reaching certain pages. You can always run a crawl test to look for any possible errors which you will have time to correct before the next update: https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test
Also some pages may be blocked intentionally from robots.txt and no-follow tags.
-
Hi David,
Thanks for your reply.
I'm concerned that on the competitor websites that we are evaluating using OSE, their websites' internal links are displaying much higher numbers than ours (27 vs ~300) even though our websites are of similar size. Could this possibly highlight an issue with our website structure (i.e. crawlers are having an issue finding ways back to the homepage via inner pages, even though we have three on each page around the website), or is this a case of MOZ crawling perhaps showing incorrect statistics?
I'm trying to eliminate the possibility of OSE's statistics being incorrect before we attempt to change the structure of the website and begin testing etc.
Thanks!
-
Hi Jordan!
There are a lot of reasons you could be seeing these data discrepancies. If you're seeing more GWT errors, it could be because they have 'discovered links' through different means. Moz starts with your home page and uses recursive crawling to find pages on your site. We keep crawling until we stop finding unique links, or until we hit your page crawl limit. Bottom line, when we crawl your site your homepage is the only seed. We know that Google uses multiple seeds, so it could be possible Google is indexing more pages that way. In sum Google will never match up with OSE but it's good to use both along with other backlink tools to cover all your bases.
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
-
Drop in DA and PA and lost a load of links
Hi Mozzers, I just check a site in OSE and while the inbound domains are up the total links have dropped and therefore DA and PA. How can I find which links have gone. I'm assuming a domain passing 1000's of links has either gone down or broken the link - can I use the ISE tool to fine which links have been recently broken? I know there is just discovered for new links. If not can you recommend a tool please. Thanks
Link Explorer | | Bush_JSM0 -
Why can i see domain links for competitors form social media sites such as pinterest and youtube but not for myself??
When doing competitor analyse i can see that they are getting domain links form youtube and pinterest yet when i analyse my own links i do not have these. My Google analytics shows me that iam getting traffic from these sources so why is it not showing up for me? and is this affecting my moz rank?
Link Explorer | | RobAdair10 -
If for few links the spam score is not discovered, then what is the possibility of risks for those links?
For one of the links, I was checking the domain authority and spam score for which the domain authority was 65 and spam score was not discovered. In such links how do I assume or what are the chances of risks with these links?
Link Explorer | | Sneha.chandan0 -
How does spammy linked site have zero spam score?
I came across a law firm site with hundreds of horrible spam links to it. Of the 3330 links, all but 231 links have anchor text that has to do with "jordan 11s for sale". I'm trying to see how useful the moz spam score is, but clearly it's not reliable if this site has a score of zero. Many of the obviously spammy sites linking to it also have low to zero spam scores, although there are plenty in the 5-10 range. (see attached image). I also noticed that many sites were legit sites, but if you look at the source code, there's tons of hidden spam links in the code (e.g., www.chickasawgardens.net) Why would this site have a zero spam score? If you're curious, put it into open site explorer and have a look. It's a law firm based in Pennsylvania, most anchor text has to do with jordan sneakers and most links are foreign: penn-criminallawyers.com Is the spam score too lenient? Is the moz tool unable to find spam links coming from legitimate sites with hidden spam links? DrokMbP
Link Explorer | | usDragons0 -
Only one internal Equity Passing Link
Our web site IYBI is reporting only one internal equity passing link. I've somehow never noticed this and now that we are doing a lot more competitor analysis, I'm a little concerned given the numbers some of the other sites in the space are getting. I'm not sure I understand it completely and how it's possible we only have one. Any help would be appreciated.
Link Explorer | | wearehappymedia0 -
OSE and HTTPS
It's been quite a few months since the last updates regarding HTTPS crawling of OpenSiteExplorer. https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20770156-open-site-explorer-to-crawl-https http://moz.com/community/q/in-opensiteexplorer-why-is-https-not-an-option But, as the last update dates October 2013, is there any news in regards to the progress on this subjects? More and more sites are switching to full HTTPS and support for this has been asked and responded upon for over two years. Thanks for any updates.
Link Explorer | | EconostoNL0 -
301 Redirects: How long for Google to recognize? How long for Moz/OSE to recognize?
I redirected a few pages that had funky URL issues (capitals and underscores and useless words) to the same page renamed with proper URLs. The sitemaps were changed also, and re-submitted. Like this: mydomain.com/Not_Pertinent_Words.html >>> mydomain.com/good-words.html Google seems to have found them and changed the search engine results listing in about 8 days. But it's been about a month now and Moz and OSE still have not transferred all the strength and link data from the old URLs to the new ones. Question 1: How long does it usually take Google to transfer all the link and strength data for a 301? Question 2: How long does it take Moz and OSE to do the same? Is there something I need to do to tell them about the changes?
Link Explorer | | GregB1230