Why does the CSV report on OSE limit the number of links I can download to less than it should?

[Brett-Harland]

I run an inbound link report for the domain www.acornstairlifts.co.uk on OpenSiteExplorer.org using the following filters:

• Show: All
• Links from: only external
• Pages to: pages on this root domain
• Show links: ungrouped

It says that there are around 30,678 links for that query.

I then go to the advanced tab, and run a report using the same filters, but when I click download report I only get 2874. I've run this for the past 2 days and I get the same.

Why?

[MeganSingley]

Hi Acorn Stairlifts!  This is Megan from the SEOmoz Help Team.  The drastic difference in the number of links going to www.acornstairlifts.co.uk in OSE versus the export is because we'll only show you the top 25 links per domain. Our API currently has a total limit of up to 10,000 links for any domain (100.000 for advanced reports), so we only show the top 25 because if, for example, someone has 500,000 links and most of them are from the same domain, then we wouldn't want to fill up all 10,000 links with the same domain information and leave out important links from other domains. Instead, we'll only show the top 25 based on page authority so we can show the links from other sites without the same domain taking up all 10,000 spaces. In other words, we want to show you your link diversity.

I hope this helps!

[Brett-Harland]

That clears it up

Many thanks!

Nathan

[robotzhang]

Hey Megan

Open site explorer shoes my site has about 590 external links on all pages of subdomain but after download the number is about 120. Is it normal?

thank you！

[MeganSingley]

Hi there! The most likely reason you're seeing a higher number in OSE and a lower number of links when you export is because we only show the top 25 links from any domain. You probably have a few sites that are linking to you externally over 25 times, but we aren't able to show you all of those links in the export. Instead, we're just showing you the top 25 links from each linking domain based on page authority.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

[LiveFit]

Hi Megan,

I understand what you're saying about the 25 links from each site, but why am I not getting all the links on my report when my total links are under the limit of 10,000? I have 4700 and I'm getting 370 in the report..

When I look at the link profile in the 370 strong report it doesn't seem there are many sites with 25 on there either...

I'd be very grateful to hear your thoughts

James

[MeganSingley]

Hi James! We'd be happy to look into this to see if anything funky is going on. Would you mind sharing the URL that you're looking at? If you prefer to keep it private, you can send us an email with your question to help[at]seomoz.org and we'll check it out. Thanks!

[LiveFit]

Thanks Megan, think I've worked it out though... the report only showed my external links EVEN though OSE was set to all links...

Anyway it turns out I have something like 4200 internal links... is that negative for SEO??

Thanks!

James