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If you are having issues with the Moz tool, try using Google Webmaster tools to see who links back to you. You can also see the last time it was updated and crawled. Also, this will help you if you are just beginning the competitive analysis. Breaks down all the details: http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/the-illustrated-guide-to-competitive-seo-analysis

Getting the right links is a complicated answer, but I will try to help with a list style format. Here are the questions you should ask yourself: 1. Does the site I want links from fit within my audience? If someone sees my link on a site, is it relevant to where they will be compelled to click on it? 2. Does the linking domain have a high pagerank, page authority and domain authority? 3. If I get a link from the domain, is the link a "followed" or "no-follow" link? 4. Even if the factors listed above are high, do I want this site linking to me?  5. Do other sites like mine link from this site? Is it releavnt to my industry or service? Is it local in nature or nationwide? 6. Is it a paid linking platform? Sites that you can get links from for $5-70 are generally not good places to get links from. Google has become very harsh on paid links. Even if it looks tempting becaise you see a competitor doing it, try to think of the long term health of your site. 7. Look at where your link will be placed. If it just gets dropped on a directory page full of competition and links, I doubt you will get any value from that. Not only from a user perspective since they will not be able to find your link amongst the clutter, but also from an SEO perspective. Hope this helps!

Good afternoon! Given the recent release of this update, it's probably early days to be giving advice on how to overcome it, beyond the guess that as Pigeon appears to be favoring directories more on some queries, it's extremely important to have a strong presence on whichever directories Google is surfacing for your core keyword phrases. From what I can see, the dust hasn't yet settled on this update. Check out Linda Buquet's day-to-day documentation of results for a specific query (the results show numerous changes): http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local-important/20630-major-google-local-algo-update-google-pigeon.html The one line I keep coming back to in this update is from Barry Schwartz' article (http://searchengineland.com/google-makes-significant-changes-local-search-ranking-algorithm-197778) Google told us that the new local search algorithm ties deeper into their web search capabilities, including the hundreds of ranking signals they use in web search along with search features such as Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms and more. I am still trying to consider what 'web search capabilities' might mean, in the larger picture of things and what this says about the organic influence on local SERPs, but because examples seem so varied, I just haven't drawn a conclusion on this. A small business website is unlikely to 'out-organic' a big directory like Yelp, so where does this leave SMBs? Right now, I have more questions than answers. I hope the community will continue to discuss!

Ahrefs indexes a lot more of the web and more frequently than MOZ.

Thanks, Paddy. Got it!

Hi Dave, Thanks for writing us.:) If you see [no anchor text] this simply means that there wasn't any anchor text in the html code of the backlink. https://moz.com/learn/seo/anchor-text https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/anchor-text If you have any other questions or concerns please feel free to ask. Have a great day!

Hi there, I reviewed several pages that we're reporting as duplicates and none of them are canonicalized. If you don't want to change the content in the source code so it's not 95% similar to the other pages, you'll need to add canonicals. The Help Hub has some good info on how to do this. You can also run a search in the community. If we reported 404's in the initial crawl, it's because they existed at the time. The most recent crawl isn't showing any 404's so this shouldn't be an issue anymore. Again, there are no 404's reported in this week's crawl for your campaign so there will be no 404's in the crawl diagnostic csv. That is where you'll want to go if this comes up again though. -If the page on your site is linked to from anywhere on your site, we will crawl and report on it up to the page crawl limit set for the campaign. We're not going to report data for non-existent links as that isn't physically possible. I hope this helps clear things up.

Thanks Tom, That's fantastic! I really appreciate your help on that!

Thanks for getting back on that Abe. So OSE only ever displays the metrics for that page? IE. If I enter the root domain: http://test.com, OSE is only going to give me the link metrics for the home page itself, and not the domain? Thanks again for the clarification!

Thank you for the explanation, Prestashop. I'll have to look into this ASAP. We thought we had set all of that up, but now seeing something went awry.

Thanx for the help, The changes were made prior to the 20th but i'll try to get some links to the new domain before the 24th of July. Thanx again.

Thank you all for your answers. I'm confident your amazing team will make some interesting progress in regards with the above issue.

Hey there, Thanks for the question. The Mozscape index was actually updated on June 20th. You can read about that last update here: http://moz.com/products/api/updates We also note the last update on the front page of OSE. I hope that answers your question. Cheers, Joel.

Pixelbypixel is correct - the metrics measure the authority of a site based on the number of links it has and where those links come from. Moz has some basic trust measurements built into these metrics so it is not a case of "the more links the better", although Moz clearly also does not have access to the sort of spam / anti-manipulation algorithms Google uses for weeding out bad links when it comes to assessing authority. In general, the more high quality links you build to a site, the better its DA should be, and the better the PA of the pages receiving those links. The above point is also important too though: just because your DA / PA is higher, your site may not rank better automatically. Relevancy to the particular query, age of site and a lot of other metrics are going to influence which site actually ranks best for any one query. DA and PA are a good metric on which to base your progress, however.

No kidding, right? Thanks so much for your support, DJ123! I love your attitude, and am very happy to have you in the Moz community.

Dear Wizard of Moz, Outstanding answer! Thank you very much. I wonder if anyone can figure out whether or not they pass value?

Thanks for the quick (and elaborate) answer! Will keep an eye on the index then