Open Site Explorer > Finding: Competitor's Authoritative Links are not linking to live websites!! HUH??
-
This post is deleted! -
Hey Alicia,
Sadly open site explorer is only showing you a sample of what a site is getting. There is actually no real way to see every link a website is getting as it's very easy to block these tools. See a lot of people buy links and they don't want people to see this as people report them to google so people block all tools they know of.
You can also look at these tools to get ideas of what other sites have in the way of backlinks.
-
I agree to the fact that Mozscape’s link index is limited and that is why the links you see your competitors are getting are not the complete list. I would suggest using Majestic as they have a bigger link index as compared to Moz.com
The links that you mentioned in the question as an example, I am not sure how they are appearing in the list but there is a possibility that when website owner (or someone on behalf of him) built those links, the website where available and later get removed or turned down due to some issue.
The domains you mention are not even index in google but some results give a clue of their existence in the past.
Hope this helps!
-
Put the following in Google it will show you which links Google has indexed (Where your competitors domain name is domainname.com):-
domainname.com -site:domainname.com
It is possible that the information is out of date it is even more likely that search engines (especially Google) no longer takes any notice of these links.
-
Hi there!
This would be related to the fact that our index has a cache time associated with the links that we index. So, a link (or even site) could be removed from the web, but our index would not remove that link/site until the cache time has passed. Generally, this is in place to stabilize the index and avoid assumptions about missed links, but I can certainly see how it could cause some confusion.