Crazy # of Inbound Links

[Earthsaver]

using open site explorer I see that my pages have a ridiculous amount of inbound links. I assume it is recording the same link from every page of the website through the menu somehow? Like the about us page has 200+ inbound links!!! ahh..

Is there a way to prevent this besides like.. no-following your own menu? Or is that what your supposed to do..

~~Confused.

[Earthsaver]

Sorry I meant to add that this is a 'rollover' thing from our previous website that was built in ColdFusion 0.o  and for some reason seomoz is still finding those old pages and the new ones. So is this something that will go away with time or do I need to be actively trying to remove these old pages somehow.

Google is also finding a ridiculous number of crawl errors based on the old deleted site that is no longer online

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Alexander,

I should have read your additional information first. My original answer is below.

The correct way to deal with those pages is to make sure they redirect somewhere via a 301. (if you can't implement a 301, adding rel=canonical pointing to a relevant page would be your 2nd choice). Do this before you add nofollow links, or before blocking robots from crawling via robots.txt)

This will not only solve your SEOmoz errors, but preserve link juice and improve your SEO health from a search engine point of view.

How to implement the 301s depends on your site configuration, but best practice is to redirect each page individually to the appropriate landing page, instead of mass-redirecting everything to a single page (such as your homepage)

-------------- (as promised, here is my original answer below)----------------------------

This is completely normal. You are most likely correct that many of these links are coming internally from inside your own site. Yes, Linkscape will count every page with a navigation link to your homepage as a link.

(As a rule, OSE only counts one link target per page. So if on a page you have 1 navigation link pointing to your homepage, and another link in the text body also pointing to your homepage, OSE will only count the first link)

There is nothing wrong with this... in fact in most cases it indicates a healthy internal link structure. So there's no need to "fix" it.

On the other hand, if you simply want to filter your results in Open Site Explorer to exclude these links, to make your reports more manageable, there's a simple way to do this. From the 2nd drop-down menu, select to show links from "Only External" pages. This will filter out all of your self-referencing internal links.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.