Reports not up-to-date and competitive analysis

[Lara76]

Hello everyone, I’d like to ask you a question regarding how to use Moz for competition analysis: I am assessing what the competition is doing and, at this stage, I was looking at how they built their internal link structure.

However, the data I get from Moz at times are not consistent with what I see on the actual sites. For example, I was analyzing one specific page looking at its internal links, and the report was showing a much smaller number of linking pages than there actually are and this is because the index might not have picked up the changes yet, which makes sense.

The thing is: how can I make a reliable analysis when the data I get may be outdated and a couple of months old?

Thanks

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Short answer: if your data is indeed out of date, then competitive analysis based on that data isn't going to be as useful as it could be.

However, it could be that the report is just giving you different data than the data you're looking for.  Can you post what report you're using and the site you're looking at so we can take a deeper look?

[Lara76]

This post is deleted!

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi Lara,

Sorry for the delay.

You're right that the string inverter page definitely has more than 12 internal links.  Moz seems to have picked up on the changes now, because OSE shows 50 now.  However, even that may not really be all of them because Moz's index was already small, and Rand said it might be getting even smaller soon - see http://moz.com/community/q/what-s-the-story-on-mozscape-updates

Hope that helps!

Mark