External Links Discrepancy

[footyfriends]

Hello folks Apologies for my ignorance, but a SEO novice here… One of our competitors boasts over 300,000 external links, however when we analysed their links via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org we can only see around 10,000 in there “Number of Domains Linking to this Page” section. Can someone please assist and point out something which I assume is painfully obvious! Cheers, Chris

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Make sure you're looking at the right metrics, first off. External links to the domain is different from external links to a particular page.

More importantly, external links is the total number of external links pointing to the page. This has nothing to do with the number of domains linking to your page. A site could have a sitewide link to your competitor in their footer, and with it being a big site, that one domain could have something like 500, 1000, or even 10,000 links pointing to your competitor. So while OSE will say that the competitor has 10,000 links from one domain, that's 10,000 external links, but only 1 domain linking to this page. That's why you'll have a discrepancy between numbers of external links and domains linking - they measure two different things.

[footyfriends]

brilliant, thanks Mark. Legend

[MarieHaynes]

Mark's got a great answer.  I just wanted to add that in my experience with looking at sites that have been penalized in one way or another, the links reported in OSE are usually quite a bit smaller than what is available from webmaster tools.  OSE does a decent job, but they don't get all of the links.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Thanks Marie - I agree with you 100% on using multiple tools and resources. I'd pull the data from as many sources as possible (OSE, Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Majestic), and then combine it all in one master spreadsheet, deduplicate, and then analyze.