Google’s John Mueller explained why some links that you think are important might not be that important for search ranking purposes. He responded to a question on Reddit asking why an important link is not shown by the third-party link trackers.

The person asked, “I have the most important (parent company) domain linking to the site but it doesn’t show on any trackers and I haven’t seen a noticeable increase in DA or traffic since then. They linked in a blog post and we link them often. Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to ask them to do anything specific?”

The obvious answer is that not all link tracking tools pick up all links and that Google does not use DA, a third party metric.

But John added more, he said:

• PageRank is per page, so a random page on an important domain is still a random page.
• da is da, and not Google.
• if it’s from your parent company, maybe they have a more persistent page that they could use.
• no tool that shows links is ever complete.
• trying to understand how links like this work is fine, but don’t over focus on links.

Forum discussion at Reddit.