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Hey there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here.  ​ I think I can help explain why you're not seeing all the backlinks you'd expect to your site. Open Site Explorer and the Link Analysis page of campaigns are both tied to our Mozscape index, which tends to update roughly once a month. Just a few points on 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 ~130 billion URLs The idea here is that we're focusing on the highest-quality links we can find, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we're aiming to report the most valuable ones available! 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 reasons - including the crawl-ability of sites, the number of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. This also slightly biases our index in favor of newer links. Linking data is only cached in the index for around 180 days. After that, unless the crawler is given a compelling reason to return to those sites, re-crawl and re-index them, those links can drop back out of our index. That doesn't mean they're not still there, and you may still see them using other tools, but it just means that they're not included in our Mozscape Index any longer. You can see our most recently updated schedule here as well as some more technical metrics on our Mozscape API Updates page. You can also see when the last and next updates happened on the Open Site Explorer (OSE) homepage at any time. 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. I know this is a ton of information, so if you have any questions or if I didn't make anything clear enough, please don't hesitate to ask! Feel free to drop us a line at help@moz.com and we'll answer all your questions for ya.

I know it wasn't intended in the way I read it, but "if you can source high quality links back to your site this will help with rankings"... this doesn't mean go off and buy them - you would be surprised how many do. If you have a friendly PBN, then perhaps it's a different conversation Think about this: What are most people who could link to you, likely to link to - a sales page about vapes or an article about it? It is obviously the second one and the way that I would advise this, is by taking these articles, marketing them and then getting links to those instead. You then use these articles to internal link through to your key (hub) pages. This is a very effective way to link build without trying to get links to sales pages - which almost never happens. -Andy

Hi there. The effect on linkbuilding is diminished. With the proper care and a lot of precautions the links coming from free blogs still impact positively. Of course, the trick is not simply done by creating a blogspot or a WordPress with a few articles and some links. I insist that priced care should be taken in consideration. Hope it helps. GR.

If the Penguin is wasn't started in the last few hours, the new "bad" links couldn't have caused a ranking-loss. If you have bad links and you knew it - disavow them or ask the linking people to delete them. Disavow is a bit pointing Google on a thing they may not have noticed. If the next penguin isn't a realtime update - you can't recover until the next-one. So if you have bad links (if) you need to get them away quickly - penguin is coming soon. Go on for link earning by great, shareable & linkable content.  That's hard to do, but the best thing you can do.