Citations Don't Show As Backlinks

[Mike Pedersen]

How come when I do a competitive analysis in SEMRush, or any other backlink tool, all the citations with links never show in there?

 

[Ashwin]

It is for the same reason why ALL of your backlinks wont show up in SEMRush or any other tool. All of these guys have an index that doesn't truly capture everything.

I'm assuming that as they start crawling all of citations along with backlinks that you've built, they'll start reporting it.

 

[Mike Pedersen]

No...I'm not talking about the ones I've built.

I'm referring to ALL URL's (websites) I research. I am not seeing any citations as links for any of them.

It is for the same reason why ALL of your backlinks wont show up in SEMRush or any other tool. All of these guys have an index that doesn't truly capture everything.

I'm assuming that as they start crawling all of citations along with backlinks that you've built, they'll start reporting it.

 

[Dino]

I've asked the same question in the Moz forum. Here's how David Lee, a staff member at Moz explained it:

The links to these pages will not show up on Open Site Explorer as that tool is completely based on backlink strength to your website and has no relevance to the physical location of your business. These sites do have high authority but your links are likely too deep for us to index as those sites have millions of pages with listings.

Just so you know, here's how we compile our index for websites:

- 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 90,000,000,000 pages (which is about 35% the amount in Google's index).

Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index. So for Local Listings, you do not want to use OSE for citation research.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Great advice from Ashwin and Dino. Mike, try out some other tools as well. ahrefs is pretty amazing and tends to pick up a lot more links compared with most tools I've used.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for sharing Dino. That's really helpful to know!

 

[JacobMaslow]

A lot of them aren't indexed by google either.

It usually is buried deeply. Some directories do a better job than others in making it easy for google and spiders to crawl

---------- Post Merged at 05:16 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 05:09 AM ----------

Ahrefs has always had a much deeper index and they now update their index in full every two weeks and partial updates constantly.

Moz updates every 5-6 weeks and doesn't crawl nearly as much.

There will be plenty of citations not picked up by any tool though. Using unique content does not make a difference in getting pages indexed quicker as a structural problem with the directories

 

[JacobMaslow]

How come when I do a competitive analysis in SEMRush, or any other backlink tool, all the citations with links never show in there?

Mike, funny you brought this up, seems a bit worst lately than usual.

Google may be trying to tighten up what it includes in its index.

I recently came across this tool to check 25 urls at a time.

Bulk Google Index Checker - Free Bulk Index Checker - Tool for Bulk Index Checking

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Use GWT to see what Google is indexing.

 

[heckler]

Of the tools I've tried, Majestic has been the most detailed (for what it is worth). Even still I use a mix of Majestic + Moz + Bing/Google WMT + Nerdy data + Scrapebox (w/ a variety search parameters).