301 redirects and OSE

[mikescotty]

We run a blog/video real estate site (yochicago.com) as one of the venues for sponsored content for our clients looking for off-page SEO and inbound links.

I'm working with a client who we've linked to a handful of times in the last few weeks, but I'm not seeing any external links from our site on PRO/OSE.

Come to find that our writer has been linking to http://clientsite.com, instead of http://www.clientsite.com, which is the canonical site.  I wouldn't have thought that this would make a difference, and about an hour of web research seems to confirm that it shouldn't make a difference, save for losing a little bit of SEO credit.

What am I missing?  Any input would be appreciated.

[RyanKent]

Hi Mike.

OSE is based upon the Linkscape crawl of the web. The crawl process takes 2-3 weeks, then another 1-2 weeks to crunch the data. OSE is updated approximately once per month with the next update happening on October 18th. Hopefully your links will be visible at that time BUT it may take another cycle depending on when those links were added.

You should also know Linkscape only crawls about 25% of the web based on page authority. This is actually effective because if a page is not crawled by Linkscape, it likely has little or no value as a link anyway.

One last note, you definitely want to request your writer to adjust their links to the correct URL format. You are correct you only lose a small amount of link juice, but that can be the difference of ranking higher on any given search. Additionally the greater risk is when you redirect a page on your site meaning the link has been double re-directed in which case the loss of link juice is amplified.