Inbound Links - How accurate or up-to-date is Open Site Explorer?

[neilmac]

When I type my domain into OSE I get a list of linking domains. Most of them I have seen before and I know were active last year.

However, when I click through, many of these links have been removed (which is what I wanted/requested) and some of the pages return 404.

Google (via  link:www.mydomain.com) doesn't show these links as active either.

My question is why does OSE show them?

Thanks

[seomozinator]

Hi there

First of all, Google's "link" search operator is not accurate. At all, actually. Read this post of Rand: https://moz.com/blog/google-link-command-busting-the-myths

Now about OSE. The way it works is the explanation of why your links can be still shown as well as the explanation for why new (or older existing) links are not being crawled yet.MOZ has it's own index, it does not contain all links on the internet. It's large, but still limited. So, in case of local listings, for example, MOZ doesn't crawl past few first couple hundreds results. Here is the topic on this matter: https://moz.com/community/q/local-listings-aren-t-being-crawled

Also, the OSE index is updated about once a month, so, if you deleted/disavowed backlinks after last update (date can be found here), it will not show changes for sure.

And lastly, Even if you disavow backlinks through Google, they are not being removed from it's existance, they are still on those forums/sites/etc, they are just not being counted by Google as link-juice passing entities.

So, to sum up: Google "link:" search operator is inaccurate, mozscape index is being updated every month, not every day, at the same time crawling only "surface" links, and disavow doesn't equal deletion.

Hope this helps!

[neilmac]

Thanks very much for your response Charles.

That is very interesting about Google's link search operator.

I am pretty sure those links were not there last month either - I didn't disavow them, I just asked for them to be removed some time ago - and I shall be watching keenly to see if they are still listed in the OSE next month.

Many thanks

[neilmac]

It has been almost two months since I opened this thread and the links I mentioned are still showing in OSE.

I guess my question is still valid.

If the links have not existed for at least - bare minimum - two months, why does OSE show them?

[jocameron]

Hi there,

It's probably worth checking again once our latest update goes live this week.

The next update to the index this week should update a good number of the older links, but it may take additional index crawls for them to fall out of the system!

I hope this helps

[neilmac]

Thanks Jo but there has already been an update since I started this thread.

I wonder if UK sites get indexed less frequently in these updates.

Thanks

Neil