Discrepancy in Site Metrics

[waynekolenchuk]

I site I've been working on has been up since early January. The domain was not new, but no site or links existed prior. Link building finished 2 months ago. There are about 80 fairly high quality links mostly from unique domains, and the site has been doing well with search engines for some time.

OSE lists only 24 of these domains (for all pages on the root domain). OSE stats hardly changed in the last update so here's my question: when will OSE data reflect the current reality?

[alexhoug]

You have to remember that OSE isn't an "actual" search engine. They are doing their best to crawl the web with over a trillion links counted and crawled. I would give them several months more, you have to remember, not even Google updates their information frequently. So, OSE is a luxury in itself. What I would recommend would be instead of counting the links you have built, I would go build more, that will do you the most good.

-Alex

[waynekolenchuk]

If anyone has an actual answer to this question I'd appreciate it

[alexhoug]

Email the SEOmoz staff. You can find the help desk here. That is where you will find the "actual" answer you are looking for.

[waynekolenchuk]

I thought that was the purpose of this forum

[aarondicks]

I have to agree with Alex in some extent too, so his is an actual answer. OSE does not have an index as large as Google/Yahoo's. If you're looking for a slightly more accurate up to date listing of your links, check out Yahoo Site Explorer.

If the links are remaining up (assuming you've built links that wont get removes) they will show up in OSE eventually, however it may take a while for lesser known domains to appear in OSE's index. Try looking in OSE at your competitors backlinks and going after those, that way when it does re-index OSE, at least you'll be able to see that .

Hope this helps a little?

Aaron

[waynekolenchuk]

I have done this, and my results have been  reflected in SERP's for two months. My question is when will OSE reflect this?

[aarondicks]

It really depends on when the pages that your links are on get indexed by OSE. And that depends on what links to them. OSE will only be able to discover sites by following other links to them. It may or may not choose to index a domain if it finds one... I'm sure help desk  (link in a post below) may be able to help you out however I doubt that there is a way of getting these pages crawled ahead of the others.

Essentially the plan of action should be to continue link building and just have a little faith that OSE will catch up with you one day!

I usually monitor my link building efforts by looking at the SERPS and monitoring Yahoo backlinks. For me, OSE is a way of finding other's good links to steal from them!

Bearing in mind OSE is always using historical data, I wouldn't concentrate too much on using it on your own site as you're link building to it, but after.

We can always hope that out most recent links come up in the next OSE index! (I seriously hope this too!!)

Aaron

[MeganSingley]

Hey waynekolenchuk,

I'm so sorry that you still haven't been able to see your links in Linkscape. Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Linkscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for a plethora of reasons, including crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. Just so you know, here's how we do our index: we take the last index, take the 10 billion URLs with the highest mozrank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains), and start crawling from the top-down until we've crawled 40,000,000,000 pages (which is about 1/4 of 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

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.