Opensite Explorer Not Showing Link Root Domains correctly

[brandon07]

Howdy Moz friends,

In opensiteexplorer It shows my linking root domains as 45. I have been adding several new links over the past few months from various websites but my linking root domain still remains the same. In the "just discovered" tool it has been showing my links but not in the linking root domain section.

Can anyone tell me what I'm missing?

Thanks

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Thomas,

Thanks for writing in with a great question. The Mozscape index, which powers Open Site Explorer, is actually a different system than the Just Discovered Links section. Just Discovered Links specifically crawls fresh news sources and blogs to find links that were updated recently, while the data for the Mozscape index is collected by a separate crawler that can take weeks to crawl the web based on the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank. The data in the main section of Open Site Explorer can be collected several weeks prior to the index update while Just Discovered Links is collected constantly. While these to data sources aren't currently integrated, we are working to integrate them in the future.

Just so you know, here's how we compile our Mozscape index:

• We grab the most recent index.
• We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains).
• We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled 90,000,000,000 pages (which is about 35% the amount in Google's index).

Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index. Sorry!

We update our Mozscape Index every 4 weeks. Crawling the entire Internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks, but our crawlers are always in motion. When we need to start processing, we grab all the data they have collected and start processing which can take up to 3 weeks to determine which of those links are the most important. You can see our most recently updated schedule here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

Mozscape focuses on a breadth-first approach. Therefore we almost always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages, and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.

If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that point to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Mozscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.

I hope this information helps! While the site and links may not be indexed yet, give it some time - maybe we'll see it in OSE next month.

Chiaryn Miranda 
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