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This is a common question the SEOmoz help team often receives. In almost 100% of cases, rogerbot (the SEOmoz) crawler, is picking up links hidden on the page.

This is what is great about the PRO platform - it often picks up on problems not visible to the eye.

Two easy way to find links:

1. Install the Mozbar and use the highlight link function. If you are unfamiliar with it, watch the video here to get an overview of how it works. This will show you visible links.
2. For hidden links, you can use tools like Xenu or Screaming Frog, but in cases like this it's best to view the page source and look for something unusual. Depending on your browser, go to the page and Right Click > View Source.

Also, don't forget universal navigation links. Do you have a drop-down navigation that contains extra links? Also, some website use javascript for fly-out type menus that display links only when users hover over them.

If you're still having trouble, feel free to private message me and I can take a look at your site, or feel free to write the help team (help@seomoz.org)

Best of luck!

To add to what Kyle said, the reason you are seeing these statistics is because you have virtually no inbound links that point to your domain.

Without inbound links, web crawlers have no way of finding your site. Search Engines such as Google also use links to determine how popular a site is. To put it (over)simply, the more links that point to your site, the better you are likely to do in search results.

The best way to improve your domain metrics like Domain Authority (and even PageRank) is to start building links. But first, I'd start by reading the Beginners Guide to SEO.

Building high quality links is difficult and rewarding, but almost nothing is more rewarding for SEO.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Daniel gave the correct answer, all SEOmoz link metrics come from the Linkscape index. This is the same data found in Open Site Explorer, the API, the MozBar, SEOmoz PRO platform and all other SEOmoz tools.

All indexes (including Google, Yahoo, and Linkscape) count links differently. The vast majority of links on the web are "junk" that quickly disappeer and count very little or none at all for SEO purposes, so a big part of the Linkscape Index is an iterative process of "cleaning" and verifying the links before the Index is published every few weeks.

This difficulty was highlighted by our friends at Majestic when they wrote a guest post for the SEOmoz blog on Why Counting Links is not So Easy.

Regarding the Keyword Difficulty Tool, link metrics are only one part of a larger formula for calculating difficulty. Because all queries use the same Linkscape data to calculate difficulty, the score is relative so changes in link counts generally don't become a factor.

1. The different colors provide simple visual aids to help you identify metric strength. For example, the colors are divided into the types of data they represent.

• URL Metrics - Green
• On-Page Optimization - Blue
• Domain Name-KW Match - Yellow
• URL Anchor Text Metrics - Purple
• Domain Wide Link Metrics - Red
• Social Signals - Green (again)

Within each metric, darker colors indicate which URL has achieved the highest level within each category - the "winner" of the metric, so to speak.

The best way to use this tool is using it to see how the top positions are winning, and compare yourself to them. Perhaps you are winning on social signals, but need better on-page optimization. There's no right answer, but the tool provides a wealth of information to see how you compare to the competition, how they are succeeding, and what you can do to improve.

2. The Term Extractor, unfortunately, can be a little temperamental. This is a known issue and our engineers have plans to improve this feature down the line. This is a really helpful tool when fully functional, and it still provides pretty good results for most users.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Under normal circumstances, the meta descriptions will change quite dynamically as Google crawls your site. It also changes dynamically depending on the query.

But, I've head and read that in certain Google local searches, you can throw these expectations out the window. I found this especially disheartening thread over at Google Places support forum where other users are experiencing similar frustrations.

Apparently Google Local caches their snippets differently, and at this time there seems to be no valid solution for correcting it.

If anyone stumbling upon this thread has come across a solution, please share in the comments.

The Linkscape index, which feeds Open Site Explorer, is updated every few weeks - or on average about once per month.

You can find a calendar of the updates here - http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape%20Schedule

Here's how the process works: The Linkscape crawlers explore the entire web - this generally takes at least 2 weeks. Then another couple of weeks are spent processing this information (it's a lot of processing!) So in theory, by the time it is released, the index could contain some links up to 3-4 weeks old. In edge cases, for example it's been 3-4 weeks since the last update, the links could be up to 6-7 weeks old.

Only links that were found in the last crawl are included. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do to speed this up.

That said the vast majority of these links will still exist. Linkscape has built in biases for links with permanence. This helps deal with the fact that 50% of the web disappears every year.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

Blogscape is awesome for monitoring links and social mentions, but I've got some good news, and I've got some bad news.

The bad news - Blogscape is under construction for the moment and won't be available for awhile.

The good news - Shhh... Don't tell anyone, but the SEOmoz team is working on a super secret mission to upgrade Blogscape with lots of cool new functionality.

Look for a post soon on the SEOmoz blog.

Thanks!

Hi Alan, it's an odd response. The traffic numbers are pulled from Google Analytics. My belief was that GA is capitalization agnostic - meaning it doesn't matter if the keyword is capitalized or not. Let's see if we can get an SEOmoz engineer to weigh in.

Manism is one word and will most likely be interrupted as such by the Search Engines. Since it is thematically related to "man" it might still pass some benefit if contained in anchor text.

Whereas "askmen" is interpreted as 2 separate words. This might pass more value, but the effect is most likely minimal as Google becomes more sophisticated.

1. Ideally, but not always the case with smaller sites, local sites and folks who can't get their own branded domain. But you are correct, there's a great deal of difference between a keyword rich domain and a non-keyword domain.

Unfortunately, there's no "correct" answer to the ideal ratio, although 90% branded seems incredibly high to me. In fact, I wish fewer of SEOmoz's inbound links were branded, as we could benefit from more variety.

Here's a video I made on anchor text

Along with some related resources which address the topic:

• Are We Over Engineering the Link Graph?
• Backing Up The Brand – Are Over Optimised Link Profiles A Barrier To Top 5 Rankings?
• How to Unnaturally Naturally Vary Your Anchor Text

Hi Zachary,

I apologize because I misunderstood your question the first time.

Going back to your original question....

often I explore these links and find that the pages include both a brand-name link AND a regular keyword link, but for some reason OSE was only reporting the brand-name link...

OSE will report the first link found on a page's HTML, and only the first link. This is consistent with testing done on how Google counts anchor text. (If you find something different, it would indeed be a bug)

As for the prevalence of branded anchor text, I think there are a couple of factors at work here:

1. The Domains are exact match for their brand, which accounts for the high proportion of branded anchors. See the stats for SEOmoz
2. Large online publishers like the examples you cited tend to belong to publishing groups that own a large network of sites. The sites tend to interlink to each other using the same anchors.

Having a keyword rich brand name can really help you in the ranking department. So can developing search volume for your branded terms.

In a vaccuum, I'm not sure branded anchors pass greater or lesser value than others. In the end, you want anchors closely associated with the keyword topics you are trying to rank for. If these are your brand keywords, all the better.

You can set up each subdomain on a campaign, or you can set them all up on a root domain campaign. If you choose to set up subdomain campaigns, each will be crawled up to 10,000 pages.

Remember, each campaign will use a slot. For most PRO members, you are limited to 5 campaigns.

Setup is simple. You can choose either root domain or subdomain on the setup screen, and enter your appropriate URL. More information in the help documentation here.

Hope this helps!

Really great question that boils down to economics, scale and accuracy more than anything else.

The good news is that independent testing has shown that Moz keyword tracking, especially in the PRO campaigns (which uses slightly more sophisticated tech than the stand alone Rank Tracker) provides a greater degree of accuracy than most other providers.

The biggest hurdle to daily tracking is processing power. When you track as many keywords as SEOmoz across various search engines across the globe, it actually requires more processing power than other companies have to muster. At scale, this causes multiple challenges, including cost and server resources.

Tracking also means checking with Google, so Moz has to be careful about not violating Google's TOS (terms of service) by making large requests. Other companies play loose and fast with Google's rules - and that's something Moz won't risk as the data is too valuable for our customers.

And because keywords naturally fluctuate daily, we've found that tracking keywords once per week provides more actionable metrics for most folks.