Why does SEOmoz not show links to my website?

[mfrgolfgti]

Google WebMaster shows that 55 external sites have links to my website (webmakercms.com).  But SEOmoz shows only 5 links and when I click on "download to CSV" I get a message saying that there is no data for this url in Open Site Explorer. Why is this?

[lavellester]

Hi,

Check out About OSE.  Under the section 'Why Isn't there any link data for my URL'.  This will help answer your question.

As for the download problem I'm not sure.  Linkscape updates tomorrow - perhaps check back then.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Maureen,

Sorry you couldn't find any link metrics for your site, but maybe we can help.

First of all, no two companies ever report the same amount of links. Most links on the Internet are "junk" and Google Webmaster has been known to over-report unimportant links, and under-report links that matter.

If OSE shows 5 links to your site, you may need to select "root domain" metrics from the various drop down options to make sure you're seeing the right metrics. Otherwise you may only see page-level metrics, which might not be what you're looking for.

For example, to see all the linking domains to your entire site, choose the "linking domains" tab and select "pages from the root domain" from the drop down. Hopefully you will see at least one domain listed. Use the "root domain" option on the other tabs to find your links. After this, the download to CSV should accurately reflect the on-screen report.

Hope this helps! Let us know if you have any problems. Best of luck with your SEO.

[mfrgolfgti]

Hi, thanks for your responses, but I am still having a problem with this.

I've set up 2 domains, both at the same time. contemporary.co.uk is displaying results in the OSE.  But webmakercms.com is showing no results at all.  It says there is no data for this url and so there are no drop-downs appearing.  I've left it till now to check because lavellester (below) said that Linkscape was being updated, but there is still no data for webmakercms.com.

Checking in Google Webmaster Tools, it shows inbound links from sites that OSE says have a high-ish authority eg Sourcewire.com has an authority of 59, Youtube has 100, and they both (as examples) link to webmakercms.com.  So I'm not sure why OSE is not showing any of these links?  I've added a screengrab of what OSE shows me for webmakercms.com.

HIwo7.jpg

[Cyrus-Shepard]

This seems to be one of those unfortunate instances where OSE just hasn't found any links to your site.

The types of links that are most likely not to get crawled are pages that don't have many inbound links themselves, and pages hidden under layers of navigation. This is the case even with high authority domains like YouTube - which literally has millions of pages, but only a small percent pass real value.

I checked your site on Majestic SEO

https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer/summary/webmakercms.com

And found 12 linking domains, mostly article directories, which are often excluded from OSE. Since OSE tends to favor links that pass more value, so often links don't appear. Unfortunately in this case, the links that it's not reporting are most likely only passing minimal value to your site.

Soon (two weeks - best guess) there will be a new OSE index released that will undoubtedly contain many more URLs as it's based on a new crawler technology. Hopefully you'll see your links then. Here's the post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/interim-linkscape-update-for-january

[mfrgolfgti]

Thanks Cyrus, I will see what happens in a couple of weeks with the new release.  Seems like we need to get some links from more authoritative sites.