Does Open Site Explorer purposefully not crawl some sites?
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I use both SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer and Web Master Tools to find backlinks when conducting link audits. WMT always finds more links than OSE; I understand Google's database is bigger. But what is interesting to me is that it seems that a large percentage of the links WMT finds that OSE does not are real crappy links that I don't want. That makes me wonder if SEOmoz decides not to crawl certain, low quality, sites? Just curious.
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If only we had Google's computer budget, or even their food budget, to throw into our server farm! We do realize that we can't cover everything and that for an audit you will need multiple tools. Keep in mind that Bing offers link information, even for sites you haven't verified in their Webmaster Tools.
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Thanks for responding Keri. The fact that OSE crawls higher quality sites is great from a link building perspective. However, from a link audit perspective, which is so important these days, it does not give me the information I need to research poor quality links. This forces me to rely on multiple tools.
Thanks again!
Megan
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We do try to crawl higher-quality sites and show some of the better, more meaningful links to you.
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