OpenSiteExplorer is not seeing all my inbound links

[JasonHegarty]

I know I have back links to my site from about 5 or 6 websites and most of them even show in my Google webmaster account but according to OSE I only have 1 inbound link. Is it normal for the OSE stats to be wrong?

I really want to use it but am worried the info isn't going to be accurate.

[AnthonyMangia]

OSE has a tough job - they have to crawl every corner of the web, index it, and make the results available to thousands of users a day.  It's natural that some links get left out, particularly if they are located very deep on a domain with thousands of links (directories, for example).  You may be able to get these links noticed by building links to these links.

A better idea, however, is to just build higher quality links.  Focus on obtaining links from relevant, authoritative websites in your niche.  It's better to build one great link every day than a thousand mediocre ones.

[JasonHegarty]

Cheers Anthony.

[randfish]

Thumbs up to Anthony - definitely good advice.

In addition, though, I'd think of OSE and Linkscape as a good representative sample. The metrics and side-by-side with other sites/pages are a really good way to compare, but yeah - it can't catch every link on the web. We suspect Google keeps between 100-150 billion pages in their main index and our last index update was 51 billion URLs, so there's obviously a lot of the deep, dark corners missing.

Another thing you might check, though, is Blogscape - http://www.seomoz.org/labs/blogscape - which shows our fresh web crawl and can be used to monitor new links/mentions we've seen. These URLs are starting to go into every Linkscape index soon, so we'll have all that data in the larger index with all the metrics, etc. in the next few updates.