How accurate is Open Site Explorer?

[MattMaresca]

I noticed for one of my sites, a large number of links do not show up in Open Site Explorer, including some of my stronger links.  That being the case, how much weight can I put on using these tools to compare sites?

I'm not trying to bash here, I really like the tools but if my PA is 29 and my competition is 34, how much weight can I put on these numbers? Or if it says my site has 50 links from 25 domains and my competition has 60 links from 30 domains, these numbers obviously aren't very accurate?  So how much weight can I put on these comparisons?  Are there better tools?

[JoeAmadon]

I can't speak to how thorough OSE is. I know they don't find every link, but in my experience, they seemed to find most of the strong links. I can suggest Majestic SEO for a very thorough, but not free, backlink profile.

[MattMaresca]

That's what I figured.  I'm just surprised that it seems as if the majority of my sites stronger links aren't showing up.  Actually, after I asked this question I began setting up an account with Majestic SEO.

What do you find seomoz most helpful for then, if you don't mind me asking?

[RyanKent]

OSE is dependent upon the Linkscape index. The Linkscape database is refreshed about once per month and contains the top 25% of web pages. For SEO, that's mostly what matters. The index was last updated July 25th.

It can take  60+ days for you to have visibility to a link in OSE. It depends upon when the link was created and when Linkscape began crawling the internet.

It's a great tool to use if you understand it's limitations.

[MBayes]

I agree with Ryan completely.  I would only add that the ultimate metric is your ranking for keywords, and as you are the only one who knows what is happening to your site and link profile, you need to track and measure everything to see what effect your changes have.

Link scape is a great tool, and certainly one of the best on the planet. But it, like any of the tools need to be assessed with an understanding of the task they undertake, their methodology in doing so, and a clear understanding that it, and all tools , are guides, mere hints if you will, as to what is happening in the hallowed halls of Google search.