Discrepancy in Competitive Link Analysis?
-
I currently have a campaign set-up that monitors a few competitors compared to our site. When I look at the Root Domain Metrics I see that Company A has 2,053 total external links, and Company B has 1,632 total external links.
I wanted to view these links in more detail so I ran Advanced Inbound Links reports. The reports returned 432 results for Company A and 693 results for Company B.
Shouldn't these numbers match up with each other, or am I missing something?
Also, I noticed that in the Inbound Links analysis for my competitors there are a number of results listed that are not actually inbound links, but are internal links from there own site.
Is there a reason these are appearing?
I am having problems because I am trying to use this campaign to show the improvements in our site vs our competitors. However, OSE shows dramatically fewer total external links for our site (about 260 vs 3200 in Webmaster Tools) and I cannot tell if the competitor data is accurate?
Thanks
-
I don't want to be rude, but my original question has not been answered. Any thoughts?
-
Awesome. I'd figured that it might be the internal links.
-
Erica,
Thanks for taking the time to respond to this question. Unfortunately, one question still remains unanswered. I understand the limitations of OSE, and I can live with that for now.
However, I still do not get why the root domain metrics for my competitors show significantly more "total external links" than the Advanced Inbound Link report I ran. I do not believe this has to do with filters, especially since OSE is reporting **fewer **links when I run the advanced report.
It might be that I just don't understand the terminology, which is what I am trying to figure out. What is the difference between Total External Links that I see in Competitive Domain Analysis for a campaign and the Advanced Inbound Link report analysis for the same domain? Since the numbers are different I assume the terms are not the same, but I do not understand why.
EDIT - I figured out the internal links showing up issue, they are actually from a different language version of the companies site so they show up as www.example.de linking to www.example.com.
Thanks
-
OSE has filters on it that you can use to include or discard internal links. Check out those filters and see how they're set. Default includes internal links and also no-follow links. Depending on what info you're looking for.
OSE's data is populated with our Linkscape crawler. We do this so we can have the best data possible and try to only crawl quality links. Read more about our latest updated that included 58 billion URLs. That said, we do not crawl as many links as Google, so we do not report as much. However, by trying to crawl the best data out there instead of everything, we stand by our competitor comparison as the only backlinks we're not picking up compared to Google are low-value ones. No crawler -- even Google -- picks up every single backlink to your site.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Should I get a link from a low quality directory?
While doing some backlink research of similar ranking sites I noticed that a few of them had links from a directory called Infignos, it has a moz DA of 37 and a low spam score of 3, so it doesn't look like complete junk. But the posts on it look terrible, like people are just putting keywords with a small description to get rankings. Should I bother posting something similar to be competitive or just move on? Any advice or feedback on this is much appreciated, I know some of these things are not quality sites but I was wondering the best way to filter that out. Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | iwantclarity0 -
Moz Competitive Analysis Leaving Me Confused
I'm doing work for https://www.charlestonblackcabcompany.com While I know whey we are only at #2 for Charleston Party Bus as Google treats it as a branded keyword search and I don't know of any ways around that there are other competitors that don't make sense to me. These guys are #1 for Charleston Limo Service and we are further down the list despite having much better numbers across the board for months now with out seeing much gain. https://mza.seotoolninja.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.charlestonlimo360.com%2F&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=1&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site= I'm talking over 6 months and still these guys and some others whose competitive analysis shows us beating them across the board still has us further down the rankings for over 6 months. It seems like the competitive analysis doesn't matter at all.
Competitive Research | | mwaters19790 -
Are aboutus.org links good?
Greetings Mozzers, I've posted several clients on aboutus.org sometime ago and it doesn't look like it is showing up on OSE. Its been well over 5 weeks. I have looked on their profile and none of the links are rel="nofollow" is there another thing I can check that would take all the juice away from them? Or does someone know if this is a good place to use? Thanks for any advice and clarification!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Open Site Explorer Date of Links obtained
Hi is there anyway to compare a competitors profile over two time periods ie, 6 months ago, then today for example. I have the sites within a current campaign, i would like for example to find a competitors back-links they have obtained in the last 6 months. As some of my competitors have 1000s of links to its difficult to see what they have been upto thanks
Competitive Research | | Will_Craig1 -
Effort for "moderate competition" keywords
I'm rather new to this, and while I'm getting some sense of everything I'm trying to figure out what kind of scope of work lays ahead of me. The keywords I'm looking to rank for are "moderate difficulty" -- somewhere between the 45%-55% "difficulty scale" on seomoz's keyword difficulty report. Assuming I have a number of "A-grade" (according to SEOmoz's reports) optimized pages for these keywords, how many links of a given quality level should I be looking at building up? I mean, of course, the more the better, but if I'm gunning for high DA/PA pages, am I looking at dozens here or hundreds of such links? I can imagine that any answer isn't going to come with much specificity, but if there was just an "idea" of the scale of backlinking involved here, that'd be great!
Competitive Research | | yoni450 -
Keyword - Competition between competitors
So, I'm about 2-3 weeks into my subscription and see a renewal coming. I love the information I'm getting - but I really want to maximize my capabilities with these tools. Any article/blogs or forum post suggestions that I should read would be awesome, right now I'm still in that phase where i see lots of cool things - but have no idea to fully use them to really give me that even bigger boost. My First Question is - There are some keywords, that I climb and sometimes slip. But overall a competitor and i flip flop between 15-22 range for it. What would be a good way for me to really add that extra push to throw me down into the top ten and leave them in the dust?.. Also on the Keyword topic - There are a lot of keywords they probably rank for that I don't, what is the best way to go about identifying keywords they may targeting/have a good presence in that I'm not aware of. I do have a site that is on multiple newspapers, and .gov sites. Among other things... This has already proven to be very good for me. But I'm 99% sure I have a few/lot of leaks, that if they were plugged - We would see a lot of good things come from those results.
Competitive Research | | choiceenergy0 -
Internal linking structure
Hello, Is there a way to see the most anchor text of a sites internal linking structure, that is not mine. For example how many times a competitor used the anchor text "door" on their site. Not external links though, just the internal ones. Thank you, Ada
Competitive Research | | digitalops0 -
Ive been busy link building for about 3 months and my seomoz account says i have no links?
Wondering why none of my links are showing in my dashboard altho many were accepted 3 months ago? many Thanks, Zoe.
Competitive Research | | zozzer0