Link Diagnosis and Open Site Explorer
-
I work at a web design firm that's starting to offer SEO to its clients. They want to keep costs down until the SEO side becomes more established, so I've been using mostly free tools to do the SEO. I've been using a website called LinkDiagnosis.com to check backlinks for clients. It says the data is provided by SEOmoz, so I thought it must be pretty reliable. However, I just signed up for the PRO trial to test out all of SEOmoz's tools (& hopefully convince my company to sign us up), and I find that the link information between the 2 tools can be vastly different! Sometimes the number of unique linking domains is very close, but other times it can be off by hundreds, even thousands, with Open Site Explorer typically providing the higher numbers.
Is the Link Diagnosis tool really powered with data from SEOmoz, or does it just receive a portion of the data, since it's a free tool? I'm just trying to figure out what will be the most reliable solution for me to keep using, and the discrepancies between the two tools has caused me to question the reliability of both.
Thanks,
Hector
-
SEOmoz provides an API of it's Linkscape data that other companies, even individuals can use for their own purposes. Oftentimes companies buy this data and use it in their own reports. Sometimes they use all of the data, sometimes just a portion of it.
Unfortunately, there's no good way for me to tell how Link Diagnosis uses the SEOmoz data. To save money and resources, some companies "cache" the data - which works fine as long as they update the cache regularly. I'm not saying this to disparage Link Diagnosis, I simply don't know enough about them.
That said, you can be assured that Open Site Explorer always has the latest, freshest and most accurate OSE data. Every time you use OSE, fresh data is served with no long-term caching, so it proves itself a very reliable tool for webmasters.
-
I dont see how you would question the validity of OSE in that scenario
OSE data does change from month to month based on the data from the crawl, maybe LD uses older data? or maybe you are seeing the same data presented with different segments applied - are you looking at exactly the same data?
Just pay for OSE If you want to do seo, you need the tools
S
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to increase DA and PA of my site.
I have been working on my site for the last 4 months and still, I am not getting improvement in site DA, PA, and site ranking. Also, I am generating unique content. Here is the Website link https://techynewx.com/
Moz Pro | | randomghrytu0 -
Link Profile - What is Good or Bad?
How can I tell (using Moz tools) which links are okay or not? Looking at them, some are clearly just for rank, but are they worth my effort in removing them? And, if I remove a bunch of links suddenly, will Google penalize me? And how do I know if my link profile is to blame? My site was ranking pretty well in June and has steadily fallen around 4-5 spots across all of my keywords. Some of my competitors without as good of DA, PA and links are outranking me.
Moz Pro | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Links not appearing in Moz tool
Hey Guys I am finding that my Moz tool isn't showing links that are definitely there like from social media etc. Also links that are there about 4-5 months are not showing either! am i doing something wrong?
Moz Pro | | Johnny_AppleSeed0 -
How can a site have a backlink from Barclays website?
Hi, I have entered a competitiors website www.my-wardrobe.com into Open Site to see who they get links from and to my surprise they have a load from Barclays Business Banking. When I visit the page I can not see the links. But if I search the pages source code for my-wardrobe, there I have it, a link to my-wardrobe.com. How have they done this? Surely Barclays haven't sold them it? And more so, why are they receiving link juice when you cant even see the link on the Barclays page in question - http://www.barclays.co.uk/BusinessBanking/P1242557952664 Thanks | |
Moz Pro | | YNWA
| | <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>http://www.my-wardrobe.com" class="popup" title="Link opens in a new window" rel='' onmousedown="dcsMultiTrack('DCS.dcsuri','BusinessBankingfromBarclays/Footer/wwwmywardrobecom', 'WT.ti', '','WT.dl','1');"> |
| | www.my-wardrobe.com |
| |
|
| | |0 -
Advanced Link Report Different Link # than Total Links??
Hi, I've downloaded a csv report for links in "advanced reports" section. At the very top in blue OSE lists overall metrics, i.e. Domain Auth, Page Auth, Linking Root Domains, and then it lists "Total Links" at 1,769. When I download the advanced report in csv I have 505 total links in Excel. Why is there a difference between Total Links and what I have downloaded? What makes up the Total Links? The report I created included, "inbound links/linking pages, Types of Links: any; Links that come from: Any Page, Any IP; Links that link to: any page on subdomain; links with properties: any; Thanks!
Moz Pro | | toby-020 -
4XX links in SEOmoz
My campaign is showing me that I have 7 4XX errors. Is there anyway to see where these pages are linked from in order to remove the links?
Moz Pro | | MirandaP0 -
Non-Recognition of Links
Hi All, I asked about a client last month and have had to do some other digging to try to find out what's going on with its Google rankings. According to our link-building spreadsheet, we have got up to 50 links (from 50 domains) in process of being actioned and a large proportion of these are actually in existence. There are two questions:- 1. Open Site Explorer only recognises 3 domains - as I know that other domains exist and are pointing (mostly 'followed'), what can be the reason OSE doesn't recognise this? 2. What can be done to encourage these external links to be more easily accessible by OSE and, presumably other bots? Other Points:- 1. I initially thought it might be crawl blocking issue causing the rankings, but Bing/Yahoo rankings are slowly dragging themselves upwards. 2. Robots.txt is not blocking any of the site 3. Pro on-site analysis for the target keyword is 'A' 4. The website's stats per OSE are better than some competitors in the top 20 except on the root domain issue, which is why the above point is important. Link building for other clients has worked really well without hiccups and with general gradual recognition, so any tips from more experienced folks out there would be gratefully appreciated. Many thanks, Martin
Moz Pro | | Nobody15609869897230 -
What is the best way to analyze all of the outgoing links from a website to determine which links are not beneficial?
I've recently been tasked with the SEO on an old site that was ranking somewhere on page two for desirable keyword phrases. The site was taken completely offline for a few months and started ranking on page one for the same desirable keyword phrases. The site has a lot of link partners and I think that some of the links from the site are going to undesirable pages and I'm looking for the best way to get rid of the links that are hurting the sites rankings.
Moz Pro | | kerrick-955310