Why links coming from this page are never found? (opensiteexplorer)

[Earthsaver]

There is a very strong authority and ranking website that has links on it to some of our competitors websites and other companies. I used opensiteexplorer to check if these links were showing up as backlinks on competitors site but I was unable to find them.

This 'powerful' page of links has been around for quite a while so I don't think time has anything to do with it.

SEOmoz toolbar itself gives the particular page good rank, trust, and authority.

Using this website (not sure it has any use) http://rapid.searchmetrics.com/en/  it finds the outbound links and domains.

I was unable to find any nofollow or noindex things anywhere on the site..

Just looking at the site and it's links I would think it an ideal backlink target for my company. However using opensiteexplorer I am lead to believe this backlink is never being found?

Any thoughts? Cheers

[evolvingSEO]

This 'powerful' page of links has been around for quite a while so I don't think time has anything to do with it.

What's "quite a while"? OSE can take 30 days.

Just looking at the site and it's links I would think it an ideal backlink target for my company. However using opensiteexplorer I am lead to believe this backlink is never being found?

If the link is on the page, its clickable and there its followed, Google will count it.

• Make sure the page on YOUR site doesn't have a noindex or nofollow in the meta robots tag
• Make sure your canonical tag is correct
• Make sure its not under "disallow" in robots.txt
• Also, you can check for backlink in Google Webmaster Tools. Its not a complete list though.

Hope that helps!!

-Dan

[Earthsaver]

I guess to be more specific.. the page has likely been around for years.

Yes the link is clickable and from what I can tell should be a quality link.

I guess my real question is why opensite explorer is not seeing it. Not just on my page but on ANY of the pages it links to.

[icecarats]

My only guess is that it's not in the OpenSite Explorer index. Keep in mind that the internet is a pretty big place, and even Google, with far more resources than SEOMoz, doesn't see 'every page'. I am totally guessing here (because this probably gets proprietary into how Roger Mozbot actually works) but I think OpenSite Explorer's index is a combination of the 'top' web sites by traffic, with the spider opportunistically picking up URLs from us Pro Mozzers after we submit for crawls. I have a client in a very niche industry, and probably less than 20% of their backlinks show up in OSE. Part of that is probably bad links, but the other is that their index can't contain the entire internet.

Note, this is all theorizing, I haven't seen or heard anything confirming this.

One last thing, to get an idea of the engineering problems involved, this site is always neat to check out:

http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/

[Earthsaver]

Yea it is hard to think about how big the web is now. Didn't realize there was such a huge gap between Google and Bing indexes though,,

I am guessing it is just a matter or 'Roger' not finding the page just wanted to see if there was any other common reason it may not appear.

[Francisco_Meza]

Valery, I gave you a thumbs up.

**I have a client in a very niche industry, and probably less than 20% of their backlinks show up in OSE. **

GWT reports 100's more root domains linking to my site while Roger Mozbot only reports about 100. OSE is not by any means perfect, but it serves as competitor analysis.

Alex, don't get lost and only focus on link building. WRITE GREAT CONTENT so other sites want to link to you.

[Mcarle]

Very good point, I can't find a certain link either, I guess the internet is so huge that no one tracking method has all the records all in one place...

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Lots of excellent answers here deserving of many thumbs up, so I'll just throw in my 2 cents.

OSE generally reports anywhere from 40-90% of the links found in Google Webmaster Tools. Because of the emphasis on quality over quantity, it doesn't list every link. That said, the SEOmoz Linkscape team is working hard at delivering an index that may be 3x the size of the current index - which means a ton of links. W00t!

Check out this interview with Rand where he talks about this - http://pointblankseo.com/rand-fishkin

Regardless, it does seem odd that a site with good link metrics would have none of its outbound links counted. One possibility is that even though Linkscape knows about the high authority page through other inbound links (and can therefor assign metrics such as MozRank and MozTrust to it) the URL itself has blocked Linkscape from crawling.

In this case, you would see data for the high authority URL just like you described, but OSE would have no record of the outbound links on the page, because it wasn't allowed to crawl.

This is only one possible explanation out of many. You could check the robots.txt or meta data of the URL and questions and see if anything is blocked. It's hard to tell from this end without knowing the exact URL.

Regardless, I hope this sheds some light on the issue. Best of luck!