Links from External Sites not Showing on OpenSite or Google Webmaster Tools

[lilactree]

Hi,

I asked this in another post, but didn't get a solid answer. For several websites I manage, I have access to their Google Webmaster Tools. When I put the site through there, or the link:// or SEOMoz's OpenSite link reporter, I get not even a fraction of the links that I know are pointing to the websites in question. Some of these links are from home pages or side columns, and some are from articles keep within a website, like at Inc.com. I wondered if the links in question were not themselves being indexed, but if I do a very specific search, I can pull them up in the search results. Is it just common knowledge that these link tools are not accurate? And to assume that somehow, search engines really do see all of the inbound links, even if our reporting tools don't.

Thanks in advance!

[RyanKent]

OpenSite explorer is based upon the Linkscape crawl of the web. Linkscape crawls the top 25% of web pages on the web, not 100% of the web. Generally speaking, if your link is not in the top 25% of web pages, it does not have any value anyway so OSE is a great source of link information. The process to crawl the web and work through the data takes about a month. The next Linkscape update is expected to go live on Oct 18th (next Tuesday). I would suggest checking OSE again on Wednesday for your link.

My greater concern is you are not able to view the link in Google WMT. If a page is buried too deeply in a site, Google may not crawl it. Also if a site has certain issues it may not be properly crawled either.

Can you share some examples of a couple links you are not seeing in Google WMT?