Why Would Google Webmaster Tools State More Links Than Details Show?

[rmsmall]

I am trying to clean up links. I've gone into webmaster tools and it reports that I have 216 links from a particular domain. When I click thru to get details it reports all the links point to 1 page, then when I click on that page it only reports 1 inbound link.

The links are coming from a directory site which appears to have been penalized.

OSE doesn't report any links from this domain.

Should I be overly alarmed? How can I determine what is correct, and whether I should take action (the site wants to charge me to remove each url).

Thanks in advance.

Alan

[TakeshiYoung]

You may be able to do a "site:domain.com" search of the directory to see how many pages are linking to you, that have been indexed by Google. You can also try using a crawler such as Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog to crawl the directory, and determine how many pages are linking to you.

[ThompsonPaul]

All these link reporting tools rely on crawlers unfortunately, none of which will perform the same as each other. Alan. You might want to use a couple of tools and work with the summary of their data. Also remember that the crawl freshness & accuracy will be different between different tools. It could be that the links existed and have since been deleted in their own site revamp.

Especially run the same report through Bing's Webmaster Tools for a "second opinion".

And btw, Google has been clear it looks down on sites that are charging to remove links. I seem to remember Google saying you could even report such sites. I'll see if I can find the confirmation of that.

Paul

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