Backlink confusion

[aircyclemegan]

I've gotten confused when it comes to the Competitive Analysis Report in the Web App. I track in my own spreadsheet how many backlinks I accumulate. However, I had thought that the Competitive Analysis report would do that as well. But each month, the numbers of Total LInks- through Linking c-blocks changes up and down drastically. I clicked HELP to try and understand what each of these means, but could you please explain them to me?

I was under the impression that External Followed Links are the ones I was going after, however, shouldn't my records match with the one in the web app? Somehow I went from 786 ext followed links in January, to 867 in Feb, to 804 in March, to 804 in April, then 973 in May, and dropped to 791 2 weeks later...I don't think I'm understanding how the web app calculates these numbers.

And how come Domain Authority seems to fluctuate up and down?

So what would be the best way to track my progress in accumulating backlinks? Would it be my own spreadsheet or do you have a tool for this? Because I'd like to see how many I've gotten since January, but don't understand how to see this in the webapp. HELP!

[HiveDigitalInc]

I may be wrong, but I believe the competitive analysis link report is based on the Linkscape index. Every month or so they reindex the web. Sometimes they don't visit all the same pages that they visited the previous month, so they might miss out on some links one month that they found the previous month. This "sampling" of the web is identical to what Google has to do, although their sample is much larger and is indexed more often. This is why your rankings too can dance around in Google.

The same is true for Domain Authority.

A good metric that we often use is what we call Competitor Comparison Rank. Basically, choose 5 or 10 competitors and track them along your site. Each month, find the average of their domain authorities and the average number of backlinks. Then, subtract your backlinks and authority from their backlinks and authority. Is the gap growing larger or smaller? Are you falling behind or pushing ahead? This is a safer way of doing it because if SEOMoz just crawls fewer pages in one month than they did the previous, it would appear that you lost links, when in reality they just spidered fewer of them. Your competitors would appear to have lost links as well.

It is all about comparison. After all, it is a competition.