Is OSE returning legitimate inbound links?

[ValleyVetSupply]

This post is deleted!

[mozalbin]

Well, I can't see those pages as any hard competition. The first one has a PA on 31 and the second one 35, that looks extremy easy to optimize against. Are you saying the PA is over 90 on these links or have I misunderstood your concern?

[ValleyVetSupply]

The only place we don't have them beat is in the link area. the links that OSE lists have very high page and domain ranks but they are not related in any way to the industry. they look like they are getting links from programming sites.

[RyanKent]

These links have a PA or DA of 90 and above.

www.petsupplyexpress.com DA 25 PA 35

www.discountpetmedicines.com/heartguard-heartgard-plus.htm DA 31 PA 31

The best link for petsupplyexpress.com is PA 40, DA 54. Their best DA link is 77 but the PA of the link is only 5. Looking at the links the site clearly paid for link building services as there are a lot of very unnatural links from sites that are unlikely to relate to a pet supply store.

The best link for discountpetmedicines is from raypasnen.typepad.com which offers a DA 88 PA 34 link. That next best link for this site is PA 37 DA 31. Clearly this site's back links were paid for with a link building service. They are very spammy.

The only problem link you are facing is the one from the typepad.com domain. That domain is an absolutely junkyard directory overflowing with spam links. They have 500 links on the page so the value of the link will be diluted. Also keep in mind OSE is a tool used to offer indicators. We see the link but that doesn't mean that Google values the link. Maybe Google does, or maybe they have devalued the link and don't offer it any weight in the rankings. Even if they do what you are faced with is beating a site that has a DA of 31.

Are the links that OSE is returning legitimate?

The links appear based on Linkscape's crawl of the web. The links were present at the time the Linkscape database last collected data. The index was last updated on July 25th. The links could have been made up to 6 weeks prior to that time. At some point in June or early July the links were present but they could have been removed during the past two months. Google updates their link index daily. Unfortunately SEOmoz can't match Google's crawl budget.

I am finding this hard to compete against but these links seem like spam to me.

They are spam. You may or may not be competing against them. These types of sites often draw a penalty at some point in time. Even if they are receiving the linking benefits, you should be able to legitimately grow your DA significantly higher then the 31 DA you are competing against.

[ValleyVetSupply]

Our current DA is already 53 and a PA of 25 with 7 links to the page from one domain. It is hard to get links to product pages. Our page isn't even on the radar for the term heartgard plus.

http://www.valleyvet.com/ct_detail.html?pgguid=30e07225-7b6a-11d5-a192-00b0d0204ae5

[KeriMorgret]

This may be a known bug in OSE where some downloadable (binary) files are incorrectly being counted as links. Please see a Linkscape engineer's comment on a similar post at http://www.seomoz.org/q/competitive-edu-research-via-open-site-explorer, as I think that will answer your question.