Comments on: Interview with SEO Evangelist Rand Fishkin

By: Baptiste Placé

Baptiste Placé — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:52:00 +0000

My advice on the vote system of inbound.org : at least make the vote button responsive. I don’t know how much time it takes in the US, but in France it takes more than 3 second to make the vote count. Speed up the ajax request or make the vote appear when we click on it instead of waiting for the server response.

OSE has far less backlinks in its index than other tools, but I believe OSE returns the links that count. This can be a problem in some case, when the competitors are using BH tactics and you can’t see these spammy links unless you pay a premium account on majestic or ahrefs.

By: Cleo Kirkland

Cleo Kirkland — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:18:43 +0000

Thanks for the insights into OSE, Rand. In terms of an expanded Linkscape Index, I’m SUPER excited. The spammy links are a part of every site’s ranking story, and they help to shine light into SERP trends within the industry – though it’ s easy to misinterpret or misjudge these trends. Even for the more seasoned link researchers.

With that said, I’m curious what everyone else thinks about having a more “spammier” Linkscape index? Do you think it will make competitive backlink analysis easier or harder for you? As someone who lives in excel and Google docs, it’s hard for me to look past the “the more data to play with the better” side of things. But sometimes with more data, I can definitely spend too much time playing, lol.

By: Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:42:01 +0000

#1 – Yeah, this is a sample from our sites and those of partners. We don’t yet have access to a large number of Google Webmaster Tools accounts through oAuth or some such in the app, but that might be a good idea (opt-in only, of course) for future comparisons.

#2 – I think this is a bias based on the link graph itself (certain industries, like tech, are naturally better-linked-to) rather than a bias inherent in how Linkscape crawls (which is wholly content-agnostic). We do see any URL on which link information is requested that we don’t have, and have been working on plans to discover and crawl these (though the real problem is finding the links that point to them).

Thanks for the questions and the feedback on comparing OSE vs. GWMT!

By: Kane Jamison

Kane Jamison — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:31:53 +0000

As a followup, a quick sampling of 5 small biz sites I manage shows a range of 27% to 51% for OSE external links to root domain VS. GWT linking domains. I consider that a pretty good ratio since GWT now shows quite a bit of junk links.

By: Joseph Chambers

Joseph Chambers — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:21:20 +0000

I had no idea the cost of how much it cost to run a linkscape update. Holy cow!

By: Kane Jamison

Kane Jamison — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:20:51 +0000

Not sure if Rand will be around here answering questions, but:

“We have access to a lot of link data from sources like Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, and will see as low as 40% (particularly for newer sites or those who link build from far-off, less well-traveled parts of the web)”

1 – Is this a sample of GWT/BWT data for sites that SEOMoz or partners control and allow access to, or is this coming from a wider study of sites across multiple industries and market shares?

2 – Also, regarding the “far-off, less well-traveled parts of the web,” I have a subjective hunch that OSE data tends to crawl fairly well for some industres like tech, and may miss things more often for more obscure industries. You could make the argument that that’s OK, since it would be the same bias for industry competitors, but I’m wondering if the OSE team knows of any particular areas that the data is lacking, and what types of things they’ve done to counteract that (such as adjusting seed sites that they crawl from, etc.)