Thousands of Missing Links in OSE Report

[Xtend-Life]

Hi there,

Moz reports 70k+ external links pointing to my site but when I use the Open Site Explorer to export all links, I only see 9,000+

I have tried combining different combinations of fields ('this root domain', 'this subdomain', 'all links' etc) but can never see more than 9,000 links.

My website does redirect to www. and have a couple of subdomains, the report for non www. only shows around 120 external links.

We also use Ahrefs and the crawl reports here display 40k+ links (on the dashboard and when exported) which makes me believe the problem is not with my website but rather OSE.

Any help is much appreciated,

Thanks,

Jason

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Rand, in another Q+A thread, recently discussed Moz's index becoming smaller than prior ones. You can read that more here.

I highly recommend pulling from multiple sources, you seem to be doing so already with Ahref. I also recommend:
Majestic
Google Search Console

It will give you a more detailed look at your backlink profile since one vendor's data set is different than others.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Xtend-Life]

Thanks Patrick,

I talked to Moz Support and this is what they said:

Hi there! Great question. Unfortunately, a limitation of our API is that we can only export the top 25 links from each linking root domain. This means that if the majority of your links are coming from a small number of domains, we would only be able to export a small percentage of your links. This includes internal links as well as external links. This process ensures that you have a wider range of data from all domains linking to you in the CSV rather than a focus on data from a couple of domains. If you want a full export of link metrics, you may want to take a look at our API to set up your own calls.

I'm embarrassed to say I didn't even think of using the Google Search Console! Will be doing so now haha.

Thanks,

Jason