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Open Site Explorer and Expired Links?
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Hi guys,
I've been checking a few domains for SEO purposes and it appears that OSE is indexing a lot of links which no longer exist, this has been the case for over 6 months - does OSE cleanse expired links? As I'm sure they will be contributing to authority in the eyes of Moz?
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Though you are correct.
I believe the talk you are referring to from Rand is about Google.
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The main index uses data that was crawled in the last 120 days (we may expand that number).
But it includes all the domains/pages that we crawled and all domains/pages that were linked to by pages that we crawled. So a page/domain may exist in the index if there is a link to it on a page. But pages that don't exist tend not to have a lot of links to them as a result have a very low PA/DA.
Once crawl data gets to old it will not be used for further index so bad links will expire that way.
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According to testing described here: http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/7-empowering-mozcon-presentations
Some link value is, surprisingly, retained even after the link is removed.
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