Discovered & Lost

In this guide you’ll learn more about the Discovered & Lost Linking Domains section of the Link Explorer tool. If you need help understanding terminology used throughout the tools, please see our glossary. If you’re looking for information on how to investigate lost links and linking domains, please see our troubleshooting guide.

Quick Links

• Find Your Discovered & Lost Linking Domains
• Explore Links Using the Overview Chart
• Understanding Discovered & Lost
• When Was a Link Last Crawled?
• Understanding Link Explorer Terminology

To identify a site's discovered and lost linking domains with Link Explorer, follow these steps from within the Discovered and Lost section:

1. Use the drop-down to select the scope of your search and see data for a root domain, subdomain, or exact page
2. Enter the site you'd like to research into the search box and click Analyze
3. On the right select the Date Range you're researching
4. If needed, use the buttons below the graph to view the count of Discovered Linking Domains, Lost Linking Domains, or both.

Below the graph you’ll see a list of the Linking Domains we’ve discovered, or lost, in order of Date Found or Date Lost. You can click the arrow in the Top Link column to expand the view and see the Top Link Discovered (or Lost) for that domain. Click All links from this root domain to be directed to the Inbound Links section of the tool where you'll see results for this linking domain.

You may see some activity on the overview chart that you want research further, you can do that by following these steps:

1. Click on the section of the bar chart that interests you
2. This will update the Date Range to show you linking domains discovered or lost on that date
3. Scroll down to the list of linking domains and click on the Top Link drop-down in the far right column
4. Click on All links from this root domain to open up this filter in Inbound Links

If a link was discovered or lost this means means our crawler either found it for the first time, or couldn't find it during the last crawl of the page.

Date Lost is the date our crawler attempted to recrawl that link and wasn’t able to. It doesn’t necessarily mean the link has been removed, rather when our crawler attempted to access it, it wasn’t able to. This could be because of something like a server error, the link being moved or updated, or the page containing the link returned a 404. If you know that the link still exists you can keep track of this link by adding it to a Link Tracking List.

The Date Found is the date this link was found by our crawlers and not necessarily the date this link was created. It’s important to note that the data you’re seeing in Link Explorer is based on when we last crawled a link. This means that if a link is removed or altered after the last time we crawled it, it won't be picked up as Lost until we attempt to recrawl that link again.

• Learn more about investigating lost links

You can see the date we last crawled a link by exporting a CSV from the Inbound Links tab. In the CSV there will be a column for when we first discovered the link and a column for when we last crawled that link. If you’re not finding a link we’re reporting to have discovered on a particular page, we would recommend looking to see when was the last time we crawled that page. We currently try to re-crawl all high-quality pages at least every 90 days. Most links in the index come from pages that were crawled less than 6 months ago.

Once we attempt to recrawl those links, if we’re not able to find them or crawl them, they will then be marked as lost in your Link Explorer report.

More definitions are available in our Glossary.

Domain Authority (DA) - Domain Authority is a Moz proprietary metric from 1-100 which predicts how well a domain will rank in Google based on a machine learning algorithm of link metrics.

Page Authority (PA) - Page Authority is a Moz proprietary metric from 1-100 which predicts how well a page will rank in Google based on a machine learning algorithm of link metrics.

Inbound Links (backlinks) - An incoming link from a page on another website back to your own site.

Date Found - The date this linking domain was discovered and added to our Link Index.

Date Lost - The date on which we attempted to access this link again and weren’t able to.

Discovered in the last 60 days - Links which have been found in the last 60 days. This does not necessarily mean they have been created in that time- only that our tool has found them.

Lost Links - Links which were not found when our index attempted to recrawl them from your existing backlink profile. When our crawler went back to that page, the link was no longer there. A few other reasons a link may be marked as lost include there being a server error which kept us from seeing that link, the page returned a 404 error, or that the link wasn’t accessible at the time we attempted to crawl it. A lost link does not necessarily indicate that the link has been removed.

Discovered and Lost Linking Domains - If all links were lost from a domain, or a new domain is found with a link to your site, this will be reported in the Discovered and Lost Linking Domains.

Spam Score - Represents the percentage of sites with similar features we've found to be penalized or banned by Google. This does not mean that the site is spammy. It’s best to use this is a guide to potentially spammy sites for further investigation.

Linking Domains (Total Linking Root Domains) - Number of unique root domains linking to a target. Two links from the same website will only be counted as one linking root domain.