Link Diagnosis and Open Site Explorer

[hmunoz]

I work at a web design firm that's starting to offer SEO to its clients. They want to keep costs down until the SEO side becomes more established, so I've been using mostly free tools to do the SEO. I've been using a website called LinkDiagnosis.com to check backlinks for clients. It says the data is provided by SEOmoz, so I thought it must be pretty reliable. However, I just signed up for the PRO trial to test out all of SEOmoz's tools (& hopefully convince my company to sign us up), and I find that the link information between the 2 tools can be vastly different! Sometimes the number of unique linking domains is very close, but other times it can be off by hundreds, even thousands, with Open Site Explorer typically providing the higher numbers.

Is the Link Diagnosis tool really powered with data from SEOmoz, or does it just receive a portion of the data, since it's a free tool? I'm just trying to figure out what will be the most reliable solution for me to keep using, and the discrepancies between the two tools has caused me to question the reliability of both.

Thanks,

Hector

[firstconversion]

I dont see how you would question the validity of OSE in that scenario

OSE data does change from month to month based on the data from the crawl, maybe LD uses older data? or maybe you are seeing the same data presented with different segments applied - are you looking at exactly the same data?

Just pay for OSE If you want to do seo, you need the tools

S

[Cyrus-Shepard]

SEOmoz provides an API of it's Linkscape data that other companies, even individuals can use for their own purposes. Oftentimes companies buy this data and use it in their own reports. Sometimes they use all of the data, sometimes just a portion of it.

Unfortunately, there's no good way for me to tell how Link Diagnosis uses the SEOmoz data. To save money and resources, some companies "cache" the data - which works fine as long as they update the cache regularly. I'm not saying this to disparage Link Diagnosis, I simply don't know enough about them.

That said, you can be assured that Open Site Explorer always has the latest, freshest and most accurate OSE data. Every time you use OSE, fresh data is served with no long-term caching, so it proves itself a very reliable tool for webmasters.