Open site explorer result discrepancy

[EclipseLegal]

Hi all,

I'm a little confused - when using open sites explorer to view of link stats on one of our competitors site I get conflicting results.

For example -

Page Specific Metircs shows the url www.xyz.com has 265 external links.

But

Root Domain Metrics show they have 22,687 links

Yet the total links at the top of the report says Total links 999

Can someone explain why www.xyz.com has 265 external links and the rot domain (which is the same) has 22687 links?

I've also run the report on xyz.com rather than www.xyz.com which yielded no results.

Thanks in advance

[AlanMosley]

Root domain means all domains that end in xyz.com. not just www.xyz.com

that could be admin.xyz.com, sales.xyz.com, xyz.com, www.xyz.com

but total links should be the highest

[EclipseLegal]

Thanks for the reply Alan

Thats what I thought but when I rerun the search on just xyz.com it just says no results. So how do I view all these over 21k odd links?

[AlanMosley]

do a search in google for site:xyz.com, you may see some different subdomains.

You would expect that eitehr xyz.com or www.xyz to have the majority fo links, but it may be there have another popuular subdomains, like forum.xyz.com

[EclipseLegal]

Gotcha, thanks again.

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

If you havn't tryed it, there are options above the results, change  the "to" feild from 'this page' to 'pages on this root domain'.

That should give all the links to your root domain.

[EclipseLegal]

Yup - tried that and no difference.

[EclipseLegal]

Just tried this and there are no other subdomains listed in google other than www. Beginning to suspect the results shown in open site explorer are not correct.

[AlanMosley]

You maybe right, if you can give us a url i will take a look.

[EclipseLegal]

Sure - I'll pm you it as these questions show in serps themselves.

[AlanMosley]

I see what you mean, i cant work it out, try thr feedback tab on the side and ask SEOMoz, they will either explain it or fix it.

[EclipseLegal]

Will do, thanks again.