Only one internal Equity Passing Link

[wearehappymedia]

Our web site IYBI is reporting only one internal equity passing link. I've somehow never noticed this and now that we are doing a lot more competitor analysis, I'm a little concerned given the numbers some of the other sites in the space are getting. I'm not sure I understand it completely and how it's possible we only have one. Any help would be appreciated.

[ErinMcCaul]

Hi there! Thanks for reaching out. My name is Erin, and I'm on the Moz Help Team. I appologize that it's taken us so long to get back to you, things have been a little hectic around here!

I know this might look a little wonky in OSE, but it's just because of the way we build our index. It's totally possible that you have more internal equity passing links, but that not all of them are in our index yet. Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many of reasons, including the crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories.

Just so you know, here's how we compile our index:

• We grab the most recent index.
• We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains).
• We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled 90,000,000,000 pages (which is about 35% the amount in Google's index).

Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index. Sorry!

We update our Mozscape Index every 4 weeks. Crawling the entire Internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks, but our crawlers are always collecting data. When we need to put the index together, we grab all the data they have collected and start processing which can take up to 3 weeks to determine which of those links are the most important. You can see our most recently updated schedule here: http://moz.com/products/api/updates

Mozscape focuses on a breadth-first approach. Therefore we almost always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages, and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.

If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that point to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Mozscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.

Whew! Sorry for the long answer, I just wanted to be as thorough as possible. I hope this helps, and if you have any other questions, just shoot us an email at help@moz.com.

Cheers!

Erin

[wearehappymedia]

Okay thanks for the info Erin. I guess my concern is that our site has been around for years. It's not new and it's the one metric that doesn't seem to make any sense.

Are you able to look at our site and tell me if there are any crawl issues?

[DavidLee]

Hello!

It appears the site returns a 403 HTTP response for many of your top pages which contribute to internal links to your home page. Some we are not able to reach at all and others return the 403 response. So you would want to check with your hosting provider and web developer to make sure the chmod permissions are the same which is the most common issues we've seen for these errors.

Check the permission set for this page http://ifyoubuildit.com.au/2014/07/golden-age-cinema-bar/ which we can reach and compare it to one we cannot such as http://ifyoubuildit.com.au/branding

Hope this helps!

[wearehappymedia]

Wow. Seems crazy. Would something like that effect our ranking as well?

[wearehappymedia]

Isn't a 403 a permissions error? It seems impossible to me that some of our high ranking pages are returning this error and we have not noticed before. Where are you seeing this info?

[DavidLee]

These pages can be found under the top pages tab in OSE: http://moz.com/researchtools/ose/pages?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fifyoubuildit.com.au

The pages appear to not like our crawler dotbot when trying to request an HTTP response

curl -A "dotbot"  http://ifyoubuildit.com.au/branding/

<title>403 Forbidden</title>

<center>

403 Forbidden

</center>

---

<center>nginx/1.2.9 WPEngine/6.0.7</center>

[wearehappymedia]

Hi David,

I've since spoken to our host at WP Engine and they confirmed they were blocking rogerbot. Is dotbot another crawler from MOZ I need to make an exception for?

Seems INSANE to me that our host would just block your bots for no reason and without notification. Do you run into this often? Any thoughts on why?

[DavidLee]

Hello!

We do have another bot for our Mozscape Index (Open Site Explorer) which is dotbot

We do find ourselves blocked by a hosting provider at least once a week but mostly as a result of miscommunication between marketers working with clients with multiple web developers. One or two of them may not be aware of a crawler being setup to crawl a site and will see it as malicious behavior, thus causing our bot to be blocked. This is mostly seen from larger companies.