Total number of links in OSE not clear to me.

[gerardoH]

I have compared 3 sites in open site explorer. The total # of links in the subdomain metrics report for one of the urls is 46,787. Where is that number coming from? There's 125 total external followed links and 132 total external links. I cannot see the number for internal links, but I'm sure it isn't 40000+. So 46,787 is the result of the addition of what? Thanks a lot for your help, and sorry for this newbie question

[gfiorelli1]

You can see the number of internal links if you open the compare link metrics tab.

And it is surely possible that a not optimized site may have 40,000+ internal links (just thinks if it has duplication issues...). But also an optimized site can reach that number of internal links if it has a great number of pages.

[RyanKent]

I agree with Gianluca and will add an explanation which might make things a bit clear.

If you have a 10 page website, your home page probably has a link to the other 9 pages. That is 10 links. If all pages have a navigation bar which links to the other pages including the linking page then that is 100 links. If you also have duplicate navigation links in the footer, there is another 100 links. If you have links to the same pages for "print' versions, "sort acending", "sort descending", etc. there are even more links. In this sense, you can have a simple 10 page site with hundreds of links.

I am not clear exactly how OSE works with internal links but I do not find this information helpful and wish there was a way to exclude them. When using the OSE tool itself, there are 4 filters (drop-down boxes) at the top of the page. The settings I use are: followed+301, only external, pages on this sub-domain, group by domain. There are reasons to vary those settings at times, but this setup creates my preferred view of back links.