Open Site Explorer results are not satisfactory.. is there any issue with it?

[BABBAL]

Hello Folks,

I am trying to check back links of one of my competitors through Open Site Explorer, but the results it is providing is not satisfactory.

Competitor URL : goo.gl/xMXHk7

Results provided by OSE :

Number of Internal Links : 23

Number of External Links : 100

While the external backlinks provided by other free tools are quite different and more in numbers.. and here I am paying to get accurate data..

Just wanted to confirm whether I am using this tool improperly, or any issue is going with this tool?

C6JPxGE

[Kingof5]

Every backlinks tool - Webmaster Tools, Majestic, AHREFs, OSE, etc. - will give you different results because they all have their own index. You can't rely on one to get a complete picture. The best method is to get backlinks from as many sources as you can, compile them in one list, remove duplicates, and then start reviewing.

[William.Lau]

Honestly, OSE can't really crawl all the pages on the web. Moz itself is not a provider of backlinks alone but a package service, tracking, crawling, monitoring.

For more accurate backlinks, I'd suggest using AHREFs, or Majestic. You will get much more accurate and updated data. I prefer to use AHREFS but to each his own.

[JoelDay]

Hey,

Some great answers already. I just wanted to chime in real quick.

When you are trying to compare metrics between companies, make sure that you're comparing the same metrics. Often times people will look at the page specific metrics in OSE and then compare them to the root domain metrics in other services. This is inaccurate and isn't doing you any good.

The url in question has 2532 total links in OSE. I checked in in Majestic -who has a larger index because that's their primary function- and found that it had 3652 total links. So Majestic does have more because that's what they do.

If you aren't satisfied with the links in OSE, I would recommend combining our tools with a dedicated back link service since we will unfortunately miss links and/or leave low quality pages out of our indices.

Thanks!
Joel.