Competitive .edu Research via Open Site Explorer
-
I was using open site explorer and trying to figure out how my competitors are getting so many .edu links. Now I won't mention any names here but I am trying to figure out why almost all their links point to downloads of documents. Here are a few of the examples of sites I keep finding...
faculty.unlv.edu/jensen/CEE_468/GISTutorialWorkbook/tutorial11/LandUsePgh.lpk?arrow=nws&read=24922
<colgroup><col width="3111"></colgroup>
-
I like the opensiteexplorer method. The difficulty is what to do once you create the list of .edu's. We're using some of the other blogs on the subject on seomoz.
-
Hey John,We have made some updates to our crawling so it will go deeper into sites, and this is the first launch including the new metrics. We've discovered a bug, however, in the updated crawler. The first issue is the crawler is counting a binary file as a link, but the larger issue, is that the crawler doesn’t really know how to handle these types of files. This bug is causing some links to be improperly associated with certain domains. This is probably why you’re seeing your competitor have these .edu links - they're probably incorrectly associated with their site.
There are two steps to addressing this issue: changing how the crawler sees these file types and then fixing how the crawler handles these file types. We have made improvements to our algorithm so that we will be able to handle the majority of these files correctly, however, this update will need about a month to propagate. The fix for this issue probably won’t be seen for two more updates, meaning late September. Our improvements should catch most of the issues, but there still could be a few cases we haven't addressed. If this happens, don't hesitate to let us know; we love feedback since it helps us improve and make our index even better!The next step is to fix how our crawlers handle binary file links and prevent them from being improperly associated with certain domains. We are in the process of working through that issue right now. We’re doing everything we can to resolve this bug as we know it is alarming to see these “questionable” links associated to either your site or your competitors sites.
I hope this helps answer your questions around these .edu links, but let me know if you have any more questions!
Thanks,
Carin -
Hi John,
I think you might be seeing a known bug in OSE about links coming from documents. I'm going to ask one of the Linkscape people to come in and comment, but these might not be real links.
-
hi,
It seems the competition is just syndicating documents via education facilities to acquire links. to be honest links on low end tutorial sections where documents can be syndicated are not that great, they will hold some value yet it will not be that strong. I have seen this with competitors it is the same as paying off students to make blogs on edu blogs about your brand their are soo many un ethical things in the market which I wouldn't advise people to do ever.
You can be smart about it and acquire far better links for example if you do free work for a uni or you sponsor a university event, you just need to brain storm quality ways to achieve links on edu sites.
Regards
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
-
Open Site Explorer backlink results different that MajesticSEO... why?
When checking the number of external links linking to a site, Open Site Explorer and MajesticSEO give completely different results. In one case Open Site Explorer is saying the website has: "49 Total Links" and MajesticSEO is saying the website has: "6,143 External Backlinks (in the last 5 years)" and "497 External Backlinks (in the last 90 days)" Does anyone know why this is?
Moz Pro | | conor10050 -
How do a run a MOZ crawl of my site before waiting for the scheduled weekly crawl?
Greetings: I have just updated my site and would like to run a crawl immediately. How can I do so before waiting for the next MOZ crawl? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Still Cant Crawl My Site
I've removed all blocks but two from our htaccess. They are for amazonaws.com to block amazon from crawling us. I did a fetch as google in our WM tools on our robots txt with success. SEOMoz crawler here hit's our site and gets a 403. I've looks in our blocked request logs and amazon is the only one in there. What is going on here?
Moz Pro | | martJ0 -
Google and Open Site Explorer not showing as many links
I've noticed this past week that when you search for the links pointing to a given site, by using the "link:" operator, that Google not showing as many links as they use to. I noticed this also with Open Site Explorer, it is not showing the detail link information as much as it did before. Is Google trying to mask what we can view now on competitors backlinks? If so, how can we see the backlink building that our competitors are doing?
Moz Pro | | tdawson090 -
Open Site Explorer - Link Export Not Showing Same Number of Links
Noob question. I'm using Open Site Explorer to hunt down some external links for a website. In the attached image (post-pressing the filter button), it says I have 889 external links, but after I've downloaded the CSV, I only get 695 links. Why the difference in number? And if I'm doing something wrong, how do I make sure I'm getting the full amount of external links to my client's website? Thanks! GG6wURf.jpg
Moz Pro | | EEE31 -
Opensite explorer not showing facebook/twitter other sites
hello i have had my site live and indexing for 3 months however open site explorer doesn't show the facebook or twitter linkback from my corporate sites. any ideas why this would not show in opesite? it doesn't show in google WMT either. my site: http://cheap-airport-taxis.com/
Moz Pro | | smashseo0 -
I have corrected the Problems in Crawl Diagnostics. When would it refresh/ re-crawl my site ?
I have corrected most of the problems shown in crawl diagnostics and changed the meta desc. , titles etc. When will SEOMOZ recrawl those pages and show that Its correct now ?
Moz Pro | | VarunBansal0 -
Competitive analysis of inbound links
I am trying to figure out how to best use SeoMoz tools to do some competitive analysis of inbound links. With the site explorer tool I can "compare Link Metrics" I see that a competitor is beating me on External Followed Links and Total Linking Root domains. I want to dig further into this data and see how these are distributed. What I am really after is which root domains are sending them the most links. Knowing that 20k of their links are coming from 5 specific root urls would be great to know. Is there anywhere that I can see this data. Ideal column headers would be: Linking Root Domain of Followed Links (from this root domain) Linking Domain Authority The ability to drill down from there into specific links would be mind blowing. Is there any way to browse this type of data in SeoMoz?
Moz Pro | | dantheriver0