Missing back links in Open Site Explorer?

[jsoldi]

I'm looking at the Open Site Explorer for my site, and it shows 9 links to my site, all from 2 domains (showing all links from all pages and for both www and not www version of my domain name).

But I know for sure that there are other sites linking to my site. Are they not there because they are not important or because the links have not been crawled yet?

[tylerfraser]

I have seen this same issue. I like also using yahoo's site explorer which is a lot more generaous on reporting links than both seomoz and google. FYI search links:http://www.... for google backlink report.

[SEO02]

One of the reasons is that linkscape needs to refresh. There is a calendar which has refresh schedule. http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule

[XLWEB]

I'm missing something in site explorer/ I know there's at least 40 different domains (and therefore more actual links) pointing to my domain - but site explorer is saying there are only 3 domains and 41 links. Really obvious links such as Yell are linking yet these don't appear in site explorer.  The linkscape refresh isn't really an answer as I can get backlinks from other tools instantly (which sort of defeats the purpose of my subscription to seomoz). This is really not good enough - unless I'm a clutz and it's human error.

[Dr-Pete]

It is usually a mix of our crawl timing and a quantity/quality trade-off. We try to filter out some low-quality links. Crawl timing has been faster recently, though (maybe 2 weeks), so generally that's only a short term issue.

There are cases, though, where a link might not be crawled or counted - nofollow, bad headers, no crawl paths, etc. I've seen Yahoo Directory and DMOZ links, for example, that were buried so deep even Google didn't crawl them.

Unfortunately, it's really tough to tell without seeing the site in question. If these are very recent links, then it's just an issue of time. If these links have been around for a month or more, then this could be a quality issue or a technical issue with the link.