Category: Link Explorer
Cover all things links and the industry-leading link data discoverable in Link Explorer.
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How much time does it take for OSE to recognize backlinks?
My pleasure Imran! Glad you found my response useful My best advice here would be to NOT spend much (if any) of your time worrying about DA/PA. You will quickly drive yourself crazy doing so. Similar to watching your rankings from day to day, right? You will end up going bananas over it, for nothing. Not to say that you shouldn't be aware and check in on them front time to time but... you get it. To answer your question, although the amount of traffic the article receives will help readers find the link back to your web page, I don't believe it will have any effect on the link being indexed. However, the backlinks that article earns over time will most certainly help. Share that article and get the word out! Congrats on the publication, great stuff!!
| Bryan_Loconto0 -
Crawl Errors on a Wordpress Website
Hey There! I am sorry for the delayed reply. It looks like this didn't get assigned to our help team, so we didn't see it. I apologize for that! The error you are seeing is for our old crawler, which had some issues crawling certain sites based on security settings. We launched a new crawler on June 7th, and you should be seeing much better data in the Site Crawl section of your campaign now. I hope this helps! Please let me know if I can help you with anything else.
| ChiarynMiranda0 -
Inbound Link checking gets different answers
Hi there! Sam from Moz's Help Team here! Sorry about any confusion! This is definitely due to the way we collect this information for our link index and it is actually expected that we won’t find every page and link because we aren’t looking for them all! When we collect this data, we’re looking specifically for the most valuable links and, rather than crawling your entire site or every site, we collect this by starting our crawler on a few highest ranking sites and letting it perform a breadth first search to see what it finds. For each page that we crawl, we first collect each of it’s links before following these and collecting the details of each page that these link to and so on. There’s a set limit of links that we’ll crawl per page and pages that we’ll crawl per site so it’s expected that we may not follow every link on your site this way. Since Moz focuses on quality of links over quantity, we are always focused on the most relevant links to display to our users. It's possible that Moz's index will leave out some of the lower-quality (non-link juice providing) links out of our index because of this. So, that might explain why you may see some discrepancies with what other tools may be showing. You can read more about how we build our index in our guide here. Generally, we recommend using a wide variety of backlink tools to get the most illustrative picture of how your site's backlink profile looks. OSE and Ahrefs index differently and have different purposes. Ahrefs is good for quantity while OSE is great for finding higher quality links. Domain Authority is our own proprietary metric that is closely correlated to Google rankings, so our customers often use OSE to research influential sites to build links. I hope this helps - let me know if you have any further questions!
| samantha.chapman0 -
I need to know about Just Discovered Links
Hi Tawny, I am having the same issue as Abdul_Majid. The information you provided about feed.ly is outdated. The feed.ly link shortener has been disabled for some time now. In fact, there is no way to tweet our feedly.com links. Can you please provide a more detailed approach of how to use feedly.com to index our links in JDL? My site TheDigitalBridges.com does not get all of it's pages included. I tweet like crazy and have lots of followers, but not all my pages get included. In fact, when I go to the top pages tab - there are none! This is a high quality site that used to have a DA of 46. Now, it's DA 31. This is not right. It has to do with the indexing of the Moz crawler and there is no way to get proper information on how to get indexed. Please give me an answer that works besides feed.ly and waiting.
| TDB10 -
804 HTTPS (SSL) error
Hopping on this bandwagon--Just submitted my info via that form as well. Hope I can get in on the beta!
| rhmio3 -
Regarding High Spam Score
Hi there, Kristina from Moz's Help Team here. First and foremost, I'd recommend checking out this article & video that our co-founder Rand wrote on our Spam Analysis tool (they're absolutely the best way I've found to understand this metric) - but I'll also be happy to add some key takeaways from these resources, as well. Article: Spam Score: Moz's New Metric to Measure Penalization Risk Video: Understanding and Applying Moz's Spam Score Metric - Whiteboard Friday Essentially, Spam Score is an aggregate of 17 different flags we set up to identify traits that correlate with measured Google penalization. The higher the number of flags on a link, the higher the chance that it's spammy. The flags represent a wide variety of potential signals ranging from content concerns to low authority metrics. Since this is just based on correlation with penalization, rather than causation, the solution isn't necessarily to change these factors on your site, but it could be worthwhile to consider them! I hope this helps answer your questions around the Spam Analysis tool, as well as how to decipher what the scores mean. If not, or if there's anything else I'm able to assist with - please don't hesitate to ask!
| KristinaKeyser0 -
Inbound links not found in Moz Pro(though they exist)
Hey there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here. I think the reason you're not able to find inbound links for those sites is just what you mentioned: you need a VPN to be able to access the sites with a Japan IP address. Our tools won't be able to get around that IP block, so we won't be able to find links pointing back to those sites. Sorry about that! If you have any more questions we can help with, feel free to send us a note at help@moz.com and we'll do our best to answer all your questions.
| tawnycase0 -
No link to Open Site Explorer from Campaigns tracked keywords?
I hear ya, loud and clear! I'll pass this along to the team as a feature request!
| tawnycase1 -
Why is my Domain Authority 1?
Hi Samantha, We're experiencing the same issue with a .digital TLD, where the domain authority remains 1. Do you have any indication of what the timeframe could be for adding more TLD's to Moz Pro and the Site Explorer? Thanks in advance!
| yspilon-digital-seo0 -
Fastest way to get new backlinks recognised by Moz?
I can personally recommend DeepCrawl, its an amazing tool. Use it almost every day.
| Andy-Halliday0 -
Is open site explorer the best way to find backlinks?
Right so yes I can see both sides here, but too now and when I've used OSE I was a bit confused by the results -- and in part I know my experience using the tool. Though I am wondering if it would be good to see back links even those without a lot of authority... _Cindy
| cceebar0 -
Why Not Show ALL Backlinks
Hey there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here. I think I can help explain why you're not seeing all the backlinks you'd expect to your site. Open Site Explorer and the Link Analysis page of campaigns are both tied to our Mozscape index, which tends to update roughly once a month. Just a few points on how we compile our index: We grab the most recent index. We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains). We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled ~130 billion URLs The idea here is that we're focusing on the highest-quality links we can find, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we're aiming to report the most valuable ones available! Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many reasons - including the crawl-ability of sites, the number of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. This also slightly biases our index in favor of newer links. Linking data is only cached in the index for around 180 days. After that, unless the crawler is given a compelling reason to return to those sites, re-crawl and re-index them, those links can drop back out of our index. That doesn't mean they're not still there, and you may still see them using other tools, but it just means that they're not included in our Mozscape Index any longer. You can see our most recently updated schedule here as well as some more technical metrics on our Mozscape API Updates page. You can also see when the last and next updates happened on the Open Site Explorer (OSE) homepage at any time. Since Moz focuses on quality of links over quantity, we are always focused on the most relevant links to display to our users. It's possible that Moz's index will leave out some of the lower-quality (non-link juice providing) links out of our index because of this. So, that might explain why you may see some discrepancies with what other tools may be showing. I know this is a ton of information, so if you have any questions or if I didn't make anything clear enough, please don't hesitate to ask! Feel free to drop us a line at help@moz.com and we'll answer all your questions for ya.
| tawnycase0 -
I'm doing a link audit and I want to download a spreadsheet of all the links to my website in OSE. There has to be a way to do that right?!
Hiya! Kristina from Moz's Help Team here. Unfortunately, a limitation of our API is that we can only export the top 25 links from each linking root domain. This means that, if the majority of your links are coming from a small number of domains, we would only be able to export a small percentage of your links. This includes internal links as well as external links. For example, moz.com has 61k internal links, but we would still only be able to export the top 25 of those internal links. The reason why is that if someone has 500,000 links and most of them are from the same domain, then we wouldn't want to fill up all 10,000 links with the same domain information and leave out important links from other domains. Instead, we'll only show the top 25 based on Page Authority so that we can show links from other sites without the same domain taking up all 10,000 spaces. In other words - we want to show link diversity. The advanced reports have the same limitations on the number of links per linking root domain, and can only give links from an increased number of root domains. If you want to obtain more than 25 links from a particular domain (we export only 25/per domain) to a target, this is only achievable through the Mozscape API directly. For example, if you want to find the number of pages that link to the yahoo.com root domain from the wikipedia.org root domain, you could issue the following query: http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/links/yahoo.com?Scope=page_to_domain&SourceDomain=wikipedia.org&SourceCols=4&Limit=50&Offset=0 This will return the source URL of the first 50 pages from anywhere in the wikipedia.org root domain to anywhere in the yahoo.com root domain. Then, you can set the Offset parameter to 50 and run the same call, and so on, always incrementing Offset by 50. As soon as you get a number of links back that's less than 50, you know you've reached the end of the links we have that fit your parameters. Just add up all the links you've seen, and you've got your count! Please note the limit for free users will be 1000 links total. There is no limit with a paid subscription, however higher offsets take longer to process and may time-out. I hope this helps - do let me know if there's anything else I can assist with! And as always, you can reach out to our team directly any time by emailing help@moz.com or clicking the blue chat icon on the lower right of the product! Thank you, -Kristina
| KristinaKeyser0 -
Discrepancies between google search console and OSE
Hi there Paul, Sam from Moz's Help Team here! Sorry about the trouble - I know this can seem frustrating and confusing so let me try to explain. Overall, this is due to our method of indexing, which focuses on quality over quantity (if we're providing a summary of it). When we collect this information for our link index it's actually expected that we won’t find every page and link because we aren’t looking for them all. When we collect this data, we’re looking specifically for the most valuable links and, rather than crawling your entire site or every site, we collect this by starting our crawler on a few highest ranking sites and letting it perform a breadth first search to see what it finds. For each page that we crawl, we first collect each of it’s links before following these and collecting the details of each page that these link to and so on. There’s a set limit of links that we’ll crawl per page and pages that we’ll crawl per site so it’s expected that we may not follow every link on a site this way (so this means we may not always find all available backlinks/linking domains). Open Site Explorer and the Link Analysis page of campaigns are both tied to our Mozscape index, which tends to update roughly once a month. Just a few points on how we compile our index: We grab the most recent index. We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains). We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled ~130 billion URLs The idea here is that we're focusing on the highest-quality links we can find, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we're aiming to report the most valuable ones available! Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many reasons - including the crawl-ability of sites, the number of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. You can see our most recently updated schedule here as well as some more technical metrics on our Mozscape API Updates page. You can also see when the last and next updates happened on the Open Site Explorer (OSE) homepage at any time. Since Moz focuses on quality of links over quantity, we are always focused on the most relevant links to display to our users. It's possible that Moz's index will leave out some of the lower-quality (non-link juice providing) links out of our index because of this. So, that might explain why you may see some discrepancies with what other tools may be showing. It's also important to note that OSE is based on link freshness and diversity, so it's possible that older inbound links that were pointing to you have no longer been indexed. Our index only caches the link data it has for around 180 days - after that, unless the tool is prompted to re-crawl those sites, links will fall out of our index and no longer be included, which is why we always recommend consistent and continuous link building. Generally, we recommend using a wide variety of backlink tools to get the most illustrative picture of how your site's backlink profile looks. OSE and Ahrefs index differently and have different purposes. Ahrefs is good for quantity while OSE is great for finding higher quality links. Domain Authority is our own proprietary metric that is closely correlated to Google rankings, so our customers often use OSE to research influential sites to build links. I hope this helps - let me know if you have any further questions!
| samantha.chapman0 -
Same domain, different DA? (OSE)
Hi Jordan, Good to know I haven't posted something that's been seen time and time again! Thanks for the context.
| ThomasHarvey0 -
Open Site Explore page titles show as "No Title"
We're finding the URL on another site or page. We don't actually follow it or perform a GET request, we just collect the URL. This is also why you don't see a status code for the page. If you scroll down in the Moz list, you'll see that the line for http://moz.com/blog/new-data-reveals-67-of-consumers-are-influenced-by-online-reviews includes the page title and a 200 status. That is a page that we have visited as part of the crawl and parsed its source code to find the title and internal links. With extending the title, we would need to change this across our user interface rather than just on this one page and make sure the change didn't mess with the formatting of this table or any other element using the same code, The length of the URL is determined by pixel size, not number of characters so that it will adapt to screen sizes so changing this element will affect the rest of the table. You're welcome to use chrome developer tools to change your view, if you'd like. I'd recommend setting the width to around 450 pixels within the a.url element when you're looking at the page. This will allow you to see the full URL in most cases. As it is possible to download this data as a CSV, this is a lower priority than other changes that we have in progress. We only have a small development team and they are all very busy all the time. I have included your request in our feedback to them and it will be discussed but I can't guarantee that it will be implemented or what kind of timeframe you could expect.
| LisaHunt0 -
Changed URL from HTTP to HTTPS - 99% of my backlinks don't know though
I have a simialr problem... In December, a client site switches from http to https. Any clicks from old backlinks redirect from the http target to https, so the traffic still flows. But because the backlinks are to http, not https, the latter version has lost the Domain Authority. How do we resolve this? Is the only solution to approach referring sites and ask them to change links to https?
| muzzmoz2 -
Moz Spam Score 9/17 when there are no links
Hi there Andy, Yes, ViviCa1 is right - a number of factors go into the calculation of Spam Score based on what we've seen of a site. You can take a look at the factors we've found for a particular site by clicking on the bar chart image in the metrics section at the top of the page in Open Site Explorer. You can learn more about the factors we're looking at and what they mean in this article & video by Rand: Article: Spam Score: Moz's New Metric to Measure Penalization Risk Video: Understanding and Applying Moz's Spam Score Metric - Whiteboard Friday I hope this helps to explain what you're seeing!
| LisaHunt0 -
Moz OSE not working
Apologies for this! There's currently an outage affecting all areas of our tools that use or contain link data, including Open Site Explorer, MozBar, and Keyword Explorer. We are working to get things up and running again but we don't currently have an estimated timeframe. For automatic updates on this issue, you can subscribe to this outage at the Moz Health Page. Thanks!
| moz_support0