Hi Karen!
This data is updated much more often, you're right! About once a month actually - 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.
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 (so, given how new your site is, I wouldn't worry too much just yet - just remember to focus on consistent/quality link building so that we're pointed to your site during our indexing process).
When we collect this data, we’re looking specifically for the most valuable links and, rather than crawling your entire site or every site, we collect this by starting our crawler on a few highest ranking sites and letting it perform a breadth first search to see what it finds.
For each page that we crawl, we first collect each of it’s links before following these and collecting the details of each page that these link to and so on. There’s a set limit of links that we’ll crawl per page and pages that we’ll crawl per site so it’s expected that we may not follow every link on your site this way (so we won't always find all available links internally or externally).
Generally, we recommend using a wide variety of backlink tools to get the most illustrative picture of how your site's backlink profile looks. OSE and Ahrefs index differently and have different purposes. Ahrefs is good for quantity while OSE is great for finding higher quality links. Domain Authority is our own proprietary metric that is closely correlated to Google rankings, so our customers often use OSE to research influential sites to build links.
You can read more about how we build our index in our guide here.
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!