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Great question! I'm Director of Engineering for Moz Local, and we think both Hotfrog and Best of the Web are important for us to deliver the value of Moz Local’s listing management. That said, we at aren't using them for link building. The way we look at Hotfrog and Best of the Web (and all of our partners) is not around the direct value of the links on their sites, but what their place is in the local ecosystem (https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-us). Here’s what we consider important in a partner: Are they (directly or indirectly) one of the many sources of local listing information used by major search engines? Do their listings help ensure that our customers’ locations can be found with correct information outside of major search engines? Our approach has always been to make sure we have partners who can help us provide us much coverage as possible so we can ensure that the data you give us is consistent everywhere, and we can reduce the amount of inaccurate data that’s out there. Of course, as the local ecosystem changes, we evaluate whether our partners are meeting those needs — the industry doesn’t stand still and we can’t either.

Hi there - Kristina from Moz's Help Team here. Unfortunately at this time our crawler isn't compatible with Server Name Indication (SNI), which appears to be in use on your site. In general, SNI is a totally acceptable security configuration, but our crawler simply isn't equipped to be able to handle these settings. http://screencast.com/t/dB2C3eVJ7gN I found this thread in our Community Q&A forum with lots of other users running into the same problem, so it's definitely something we're aware of and working to address: https://moz.com/community/q/804-https-ssl-error The good news is that a recent update has been made, and we're ready to accept beta SNI customers to test it out. Please see the article here that explains this further: https://moz.com/community/q/moz-pro-our-web-crawler-and-sites-that-use-sni and if you're interested in being a part of the beta testing, the link to the sign up page is here: http://goo.gl/forms/LCvL9Ix8JDHfbAvr1 I apologize for the inconvenience in the meantime, but hopefully we'll have it fixed soon! Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help!

Noindex + follow on your low quality pages will just allow your crawl budget to potentially be better spent on the content that you want Google to crawl and index. It's not going to boost the value of pages that are already indexed. So if you have quality pages and product pages that Google isn't seeing due to wasted crawl budget and low quality pages, then noindexing them might be a strategy to consider. I'd also make sure the quality of the pages you want to have indexed is unique and of high quality.

thanks! someone in another thread suggested CrawlMonster - so far "meh" - I prefer MOZ and ScreamingFrog. Anyone suggest any other tools for managing this process?

I know it's not always the answer people want to here, but Matt's right - this is basically where we're at. OSE tends to focus on higher-authority links and quality over quantity. Unfortunately, while this works well for tracking the strengths in your link profile, it doesn't always do as well at tracking the weaknesses. We're very much interested in expanding the quantity as well, but it's a balancing act and, in the interest of full transparency, there are many engineering challenges. People have compared our index to Majestic and Ahrefs on the blogosphere. Since I can't claim to be unbiased, I'd welcome you to read those posts and make your own judgments. In fairness to Majestic and Ahrefs, all three of us are somewhat transparent about sources and at least our general methodologies. Unfortunately, Google is not very transparent about how they sample links or choose which data to show. So, direct comparison with any of the major SEO tools to Google Search Console proves to be a lot trickier. We're also not clear on Google's update cycle for that data.

Yes, after you run the initial report there's an option to "Run Full Report" in the "Ranking Analysis for: " box where you can enter your own URL and get more detailed metrics

so yeah - this has worked. thanks everybody! you don't see the data in the normal interface, but there in the download from advanced - woot there it is! well worth the wait!