Frequently Asked Questions About Backlink Analysis: Customer Support Digest #4

— This is not a bug: we collect data from different sources and, therefore, it may vary slightly. There is the main index, it is vast, and it's taking too long to get some queries from it. To speed up this process, we made special checks with summary data on sites, which are updated approximately once a week. We take the data for the dashboard from these tables and the data for the reports from the index itself. Because of this, the total amount on the dashboard and in the corresponding report may not coincide, but the difference usually does not exceed 1%. More relevant data is in detailed reports.

— We don't use such a term. We use Empty Anchor Text: this is a link that doesn't have an anchor (<a> </a> - the text is equal to an empty line). It can be a text link, which is visible only in the code, image, or button.

In all detailed reports, we display the charts for the year with a weekly interval (from Monday to Monday); in some cases - longer: for example, if the crawlers were stopped for updating. You can navigate by dates on the horizontal axis of the charts.

— When analyzing sites with crawlers, we use a verification algorithm similar to the algorithms of Google Chrome.
Malicious sites are those blocked from viewing by Google Chrome (you see a warning if the content that you're trying to see is dangerous or deceptive).

— There is a small number of sites (about 1500), which the data on which is considered very resource-intensive. For such sites, we use caching and update data about once a week. Now caching is disabled: we are introducing global updates to the crawler and index. After completing the work, we will carry out several iterations of optimization so that everything works faster, after which we reconfigure and enable caching again - then data on these large sites will be available. Data for large sites will be available no earlier than Q3 2020.

— This feature is still in development. It will be available in the relevant reports when we finish the development. We will also announce it.

— Now we have a universal report on all domain zones: it is located at the bottom of the dashboard, a table next to the domain map. There you can see the complete statistics for referring domain zones and countries.

— The new Serpstat index, in most cases, is more relevant. Some of the domains/pages that were displayed earlier could be outdated and vice versa - the old index might not have all the relevant information. It also makes sense to check the Lost backlinks report - some of the data may be there. If there are examples of relevant backlink analysis that are not in the Serpstat index and they are older than 3 months, pass this data to the developers of the module, they will check it.

— Data is updated in the period from 1 to 70 days: the frequency of updating data for a particular site depends on its prevalence on the Internet. The more links it has from different domains, the more often data will be updated.

— Our crawlers comply with the basic rules for indexing data, first of all - the rules for robots described in the robots.txt site. Individual blocks covered by noindex tags may be ignored in some cases. See detailed FAQ with the help of Serpstat Bot.

— We show total changes for 7 days.