Inbound Link checking gets different answers

[rsnell]

I've been comparing the inbound links report from Open Site Explorer against other backlink services and the results are very different.

E.g. Compare the domain on http://backlinkwatch.com/

When I ran my test this other service found about 30% more active backlinks...why would Open Site Explorer skip those results?

[samantha.chapman]

Hi there! Sam from Moz's Help Team here!

Sorry about any confusion!

This is definitely due to the way we collect this information for our link index and it is actually expected that we won’t find every page and link because we aren’t looking for them all! When we collect this data, we’re looking specifically for the most valuable links and, rather than crawling your entire site or every site, we collect this by starting our crawler on a few highest ranking sites and letting it perform a breadth first search to see what it finds.

For each page that we crawl, we first collect each of it’s links before following these and collecting the details of each page that these link to and so on. There’s a set limit of links that we’ll crawl per page and pages that we’ll crawl per site so it’s expected that we may not follow every link on your site this way.

Since Moz focuses on quality of links over quantity, we are always focused on the most relevant links to display to our users. It's possible that Moz's index will leave out some of the lower-quality (non-link juice providing) links out of our index because of this. So, that might explain why you may see some discrepancies with what other tools may be showing.

You can read more about how we build our index in our guide here.

Generally, we recommend using a wide variety of backlink tools to get the most illustrative picture of how your site's backlink profile looks. OSE and Ahrefs index differently and have different purposes. Ahrefs is good for quantity while OSE is great for finding higher quality links. Domain Authority is our own proprietary metric that is closely correlated to Google rankings, so our customers often use OSE to research influential sites to build links.

I hope this helps - let me know if you have any further questions!