Why links coming from this page are never found? (opensiteexplorer)
-
There is a very strong authority and ranking website that has links on it to some of our competitors websites and other companies. I used opensiteexplorer to check if these links were showing up as backlinks on competitors site but I was unable to find them.
This 'powerful' page of links has been around for quite a while so I don't think time has anything to do with it.
SEOmoz toolbar itself gives the particular page good rank, trust, and authority.
Using this website (not sure it has any use) http://rapid.searchmetrics.com/en/ it finds the outbound links and domains.
I was unable to find any nofollow or noindex things anywhere on the site..
Just looking at the site and it's links I would think it an ideal backlink target for my company. However using opensiteexplorer I am lead to believe this backlink is never being found?
Any thoughts? Cheers
-
Lots of excellent answers here deserving of many thumbs up, so I'll just throw in my 2 cents.
OSE generally reports anywhere from 40-90% of the links found in Google Webmaster Tools. Because of the emphasis on quality over quantity, it doesn't list every link. That said, the SEOmoz Linkscape team is working hard at delivering an index that may be 3x the size of the current index - which means a ton of links. W00t!
Check out this interview with Rand where he talks about this - http://pointblankseo.com/rand-fishkin
Regardless, it does seem odd that a site with good link metrics would have none of its outbound links counted. One possibility is that even though Linkscape knows about the high authority page through other inbound links (and can therefor assign metrics such as MozRank and MozTrust to it) the URL itself has blocked Linkscape from crawling.
In this case, you would see data for the high authority URL just like you described, but OSE would have no record of the outbound links on the page, because it wasn't allowed to crawl.
This is only one possible explanation out of many. You could check the robots.txt or meta data of the URL and questions and see if anything is blocked. It's hard to tell from this end without knowing the exact URL.
Regardless, I hope this sheds some light on the issue. Best of luck!
-
Very good point, I can't find a certain link either, I guess the internet is so huge that no one tracking method has all the records all in one place...
-
Valery, I gave you a thumbs up.
**I have a client in a very niche industry, and probably less than 20% of their backlinks show up in OSE. **
GWT reports 100's more root domains linking to my site while Roger Mozbot only reports about 100. OSE is not by any means perfect, but it serves as competitor analysis.
Alex, don't get lost and only focus on link building. WRITE GREAT CONTENT so other sites want to link to you.
-
Yea it is hard to think about how big the web is now. Didn't realize there was such a huge gap between Google and Bing indexes though,,
I am guessing it is just a matter or 'Roger' not finding the page just wanted to see if there was any other common reason it may not appear.
-
My only guess is that it's not in the OpenSite Explorer index. Keep in mind that the internet is a pretty big place, and even Google, with far more resources than SEOMoz, doesn't see 'every page'. I am totally guessing here (because this probably gets proprietary into how Roger Mozbot actually works) but I think OpenSite Explorer's index is a combination of the 'top' web sites by traffic, with the spider opportunistically picking up URLs from us Pro Mozzers after we submit for crawls. I have a client in a very niche industry, and probably less than 20% of their backlinks show up in OSE. Part of that is probably bad links, but the other is that their index can't contain the entire internet.
Note, this is all theorizing, I haven't seen or heard anything confirming this.
One last thing, to get an idea of the engineering problems involved, this site is always neat to check out:
-
I guess to be more specific.. the page has likely been around for years.
Yes the link is clickable and from what I can tell should be a quality link.
I guess my real question is why opensite explorer is not seeing it. Not just on my page but on ANY of the pages it links to.
-
This 'powerful' page of links has been around for quite a while so I don't think time has anything to do with it.
What's "quite a while"? OSE can take 30 days.
Just looking at the site and it's links I would think it an ideal backlink target for my company. However using opensiteexplorer I am lead to believe this backlink is never being found?
If the link is on the page, its clickable and there its followed, Google will count it.
- Make sure the page on YOUR site doesn't have a noindex or nofollow in the meta robots tag
- Make sure your canonical tag is correct
- Make sure its not under "disallow" in robots.txt
- Also, you can check for backlink in Google Webmaster Tools. Its not a complete list though.
Hope that helps!!
-Dan
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
-
Can I 301 re-direct a page to regain the authority from a penguin penalized page
I built way too many anchor text links to an internal page and was penalized for the associated keyword. However, I do rank on that page for less significant keywords that I didn't build anchor text links for, though not super high. Subsequently, I've found that the sites that rank highly for the keyword that I was looking to rank for are high domain authority with almost no links built to those pages. Can I 301 re-direct that URL to my homepage, where I'm not trying to rank for that term, to make use of that authority of the links I've built to that page and start over on the page that I was hit by penguin on? This appears to make sense to me as my pages that have been hit are specifically for the terms that I have gone overboard on anchor text links. Terms that I haven't built too many anchor text links to still rank on those pages.
Link Building | | dusty79690 -
Internal links
hey guys, these days should internal links within your site carry no-follow tags? or does it really matter? thanks!!
Link Building | | tm46150 -
Can I Boost Ranking Linking off Pages internallly?
My domain authority is relatively low, but my right now my homepage seems to have the highest rank. If I place a few internal page links on my homepage, would this boost ranking on internal pages? Or would it pull juice away from my homepage? Using the Seomoz OSE I see alot of my competitors using this type of strategy linking internally. Also would using breadcrumb links benefit me in anyway? Thanks very much!
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
LINK BUILDING - Does it really matter if the link is not relevant?
Hi guys, I have just done a lot of link buillding and I thought I am just going to link build and I am not going to go after RELVANT links. I have property/real esate website and I have been any kind of link builidng and I have noteced some good increases in rankings.. So my questions is; Does it really matter if the link is relvant to property or real estate if I have got ranking increases? Or will it later harm my site?? Thanks Gareth
Link Building | | GAZ091 -
Building Links
Hi everyone, I am new to SEO and in the process of building links the clean way. Any suggestions on how exactly I can find websites that are linking out to quality websites already? I went thru most of my competitors link building strategy - and 90% of their links are done either thru link exchange or paid links. So looking at my competitors strategy does not really help. So I need to find websites/blogs/forums that are ready to link to me if I can show them some useful content. How do I find these websites first? Please help! Cheers! Arjun
Link Building | | ArjunRajkumar0 -
Many competitor's backlinks are in content anchor links. Ho do I get these same links?
Hi I managed to open up OSE. I'm finding that much of the competition's backlinks are in content anchor text links. Am I supposed to get backlinks from these same pages using the same anchor text but linking back to my page or is that allowed? If so, how do I get these in content blog post links? Thanks. Sunil.
Link Building | | sunilmuse0 -
RSS links vs. contextual links
Which has more value? Passes more "link juice"? Auto generated rss links or contextual links?
Link Building | | nicole.healthline0 -
Value of Inbound Links to Pages With a lot of Outbound Links
Suppose you have a resource page of the Top 50 Awesome Sites in your niche. Since there are about 50 outbound links, then I would think there will be less Page Rank being passed to internal pages from internal links on the resource page. Since you are getting less PR passed to internal pages, are there other ways the inbound links can be beneficial, such as increasing the diversity of links of your domain? Sites like SEO Optimise seem to create a lot of Top 30 Resources lists and I have read that they think it is a strong tactic.
Link Building | | SparkplugDigital0