Y!SE and OSE

[77Agency]

Hi

So now when Y!SE is closed im trying to find alternative, so im trying OSE basically i like the data that it showed to me but the numbers is unbelievable different. Im used Y!SE about 1 year so i have statistic for a year. Previous month for my client homepage i have 2625 total external links and now OSE reports me only 1558, for the main category page was 16 now 68\. Most strange for me is total external links for root domain on Y!SE its always been around 6-7k but now OSE reports me 10,053. So my question why numbers so different can it be that the Y!SE don`t update for several month there data or some others reason?

Thanks,

Sergey

[JaspalX]

Every tool is different, has different update rates, rules for inclusion of links etc. As a sanity check why not try majestic numbers too?

I usually find majestic reports  more links than ose.

[77Agency]

I try the Majestic tool too.

Total external links 1558 for specific page from ose

then majestic reports me External Backlinks 5148 it`s fresh data not historical and Y!SE over a year reports me only 2-3k external links.

I can understand that different rules and inclusion for every tool but i cant understands why they are so different it is not 500-1k its about 2-3k.

Help me please what tool i can trust more

Thanks

[Cyrus-Shepard]

The truth is, you can trust them all, but every index will always report different numbers.

For example, it's estimated that Google's index was 2x the size of Yahoo's.

The web is full of links. Billions and billions of them. The problem is that 80% of them are junk. Most indexes maintained by companies like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and even SEOmoz and Majestic can't afford to waste the resources crawling, processing and storing all of those junk links. So the question doesn't become what you keep, what's more important is what you throw away.

Yahoo tended to report a lot of links. It was kind of fun because they reported many links right away, even if they weren't important and didn't help you to rank.

Linkscape (the name of SEOmoz's index) tries very hard to produce a quality listing of links - links that actually have an effect on crawling, indexing and ranking. The huge advantage of Linkscape over Yahoo is that OSE will actually tell you the value of a link through metrics like Domain Authority, Page Authority and MozTrust. You couldn't get these metrics from Yahoo.

Our friends at Majestic wrote a post that we featured on the SEOmoz blog highlighting this difficulty.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-counting-links-is-not-so-easy

No index will report every link, but OSE will represent the majority of links that matter, and provide actionable metrics to go along with them.