How are our competitors getting these inbound linking domains?
-
I'm currently managing SEO for my company's website, and I'm getting into link building for the first time. As part of the process, I'm using Open Site Explorer to see who's linking into our competitor sites, to get a better sense of what's available to us in our particular avenue of e-commerce. However, I'm finding that our competitors are getting inbound links from high-authority sites pretty far afield from selling jewelry - census.gov, parallels.com, warnerbros.com, and others. I try clicking through to these links, but each link starts a download of a file. I've seen .f4v, .7z, and .apk files listed as inbound links to our competitor. How is this happening? Again, I'm new to link building, so there may be a simple answer here, and if so I apologize for asking. However, this seems really strange to me, and a difficult situation to confront.
-
Hey guys,
Yep, Keri is correct, unfortunately
We found a bug in ourJuly index with our new crawlers - they were crawling binary files as if they were links and, since they are not normal links, the crawler couldn't handle them very well.
We have made some updates to our crawling so it will go deeper into sites. The reason for these odd inbound links from high-authority sites is due to the crawler reaching much deeper into sites where there are more download (i.e. binary) links. The first issue is the crawler is counting a binary file as a link, but the larger issue, is that the crawler doesn’t really know how to handle these types of files. This bug is causing some links to be improperly associated with certain domains. This is why you’re seeing inbound links to pages that don’t really exist.
There are two steps to addressing this issue: changing how the crawler sees these file types and then fixing how the crawler handles these file types. We have made improvements to our algorithm so that we will be able to handle the majority of these files correctly, however, this update will need a few more weeks to propagate. The fix for this issue probably won’t be seen for another update, meaning late September. Our improvements should catch most of the issues, but there still could be a few cases we haven't addressed. If this happens, don't hesitate to let us know; we love feedback since it helps us improve and make our index even better!
The next step is to fix how our crawlers handle binary file links and prevent them from being improperly associated with certain domains. We are in the process of working through that issue right now. We’re doing everything we can to resolve this bug as we know it is alarming to see these phantom inbound links.Thanks for your patience!Carin
-
I think you might be seeing a bug in the way OSE is treating binary files as having links, starting with the July update. See this thread http://www.seomoz.org/q/latest-ose-update-strange-numbers-and-links while I ask for Carin to step in and comment on this question.
-
Here is a good list of them from Parallels.com. The Page strength is only a 17, but the domain strength is 100 and the links are not nofollowed.
-
Here are a few I've found (beware, I don't trust these links really):
http://www2.census.gov/census_2010/03-Demographic_Profile/DPSF2010_Access.accdb?p=17259
-
I'm glad you posted this, because I noticed the same thing with one of my competitors as well. It was a file from Parallels.org, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was. Anybody got an answer?
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
-
Comparing Domain Authority Scores
Since your scale (like PageRank) is a logarithmic scale, it makes it hard to judge the distance between 2 scores. Can you give me a rule of thumb. For PageRank, each jump is an exponential jump - so that a PR6 is perhaps 10 times stronger than a PR5. What is the log base that SEOMoz uses. Should I assume that a 60 is 10 times stronger than a 50? This is important when it comes to measuring progress because growth is going to get more difficult as you move up the scale and I need to communicate the distance between our current Authority score and our goal. Thank You!
Moz Pro | | apo11o1770 -
Did Profiles on SEOmoz get de-indexed?
Hi fellow mozzers My profile page on SEOmoz has always ranked well for my full name "Jacob Eeckhout". Recently I noticed that it doesn't show anymore, even for the query site:seomoz.org "jacob eeckhout". Does anyone know what happened?
Moz Pro | | Jacobe0 -
Finding affiliate links with opensiteexplorer
Hey guys, I'm trying to develop lists of our competitors affiliates using opensiteexplorer using the following method When logged in to seomoz, go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ Search for<rival company="" domain=""></rival> Select Show ALL links from ALL pages to PAGES ON THIS ROOT DOMAIN and SHOW LINKS UNGROUPED Click 'Filter' Click_ 'Download csv'_ Open the csv in excel and filter the Target URL column for any known part of the affiliate link (example ?a_aid) - this leaves you with a list of the affiliate links Filter out duplicates Is this the best process? I have a feeling I'm missing some as OSE truncates to 25 links per domain. It would be nice also if OSE could do the filtering for me. Any better ways to do this?
Moz Pro | | pilkster2 -
Percentage of good links vs. bad
Hi Does anyone know the best way of determining good links from bad links using the SEO Moz tools? I bought some directory links to two or three pages on my site a few years back. The were all very obviously spammy because of the anchor text and I didn't have a high enough ratio of good links to counteract them. I read somewhere that if more than 10% of the links to a page have the same (or similar) anchor text, it's obvious that you're on the bad list.
Moz Pro | | nsjadmin0 -
How do I get our full domain link profile?
With Open Site Explorer I have exported our domain link profile but I only get 65 domains returned when our marketing software reports that we have 315 . . . I know that some domains point to www.bluelink.ca which redirects to www.bluelinkerp.com. Is Open Site Explorer missing these links?
Moz Pro | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Number of available links limited?
OK, I've been making use of the free LinkScape API (on behalf of a client of mine) and trying to get links (and info on those links) to a specific domain/page/etc. NOTE : I've been using it without any issue in the past, however we are currently facing some weird issues. Let's take this simple query as an example : http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/links/wikipedia.org?SourceCols=4&TargetCols=4&Sort=page_authority&Scope=page_to_domain What this one supposedly does is to get links to "wikipedia.org", right? I'm reading : The Page_to_* scopes will by default return 25 links per source domain if no limit is specified, so you can see domain diversity. Due to space limitations in our API, a general link query for a given page will return at most 25 pages for every unique domain linking to that page. And I'm saying OK, that's fine. The thing is that (instead of the 1000 links I had been getting before), I'm now getting just 25 links. NOT per... "source domain"... but obviously per "target domain" (= wikipedia.org) - or am I missing something? (well, probably wikipedia suddenly has just about 25 links pointed to it... makes sense! 🙂 ) Please, let me know what's going on with the above, simply because getting just 25 links is close to worthless... Thanks a lot, in advance!
Moz Pro | | drkameleon0 -
Where is the best place to add links on my site?
If I'd like to put links to other sites in my site, is it better to have a page named "Our Helpful Links" etc. instead of just adding them to the bottom of an existing page like I've seen on some sites? I'm asking because I'm wanting to make Google as happy as possible and still add them. Just in case it helps to look at the site yourself to give advise its; http://www.allstatetransmission.net If you see anything else there that I should work on feel free to be hard on it, I value any criticism. Thanks, Jeff
Moz Pro | | allstatetransmission0