Discrepancy between OSE internal links and Webmaster Tools

[unionroom]

Hi,

We have been attempting to increase our rankings for our key term for a number of months now, and we are seeing an unusual discrepancy between OSE and Webmaster Tools that we believe may be causing us harm.

OSE shows our homepage, www.unionroom.com, as having only 27 internal links (only three of these aren't 301's too), whereas Webmaster Tools is showing just over 1,500 internal links to the homepage.

The three pages that OSE are displaying as linking back to the homepage are the homepage, our blog and our accessibility page. These pages are all ran off the same template and have the same header and footer (with three home links spread across header and footer). You can see our confusion!

Is this a case of OSE's stats being incorrect (the website has been live for ~6 months) or is there an issue with our in-linking structure that we are missing?

Thanks!

[DavidLee]

Hi Jordan!

There are a lot of reasons you could be seeing these data discrepancies. If you're seeing more GWT errors, it could be because they have 'discovered links' through different means. Moz starts with your home page and uses recursive crawling to find pages on your site. We keep crawling until we stop finding unique links, or until we hit your page crawl limit. Bottom line, when we crawl your site your homepage is the only seed. We know that Google uses multiple seeds, so it could be possible Google is indexing more pages that way. In sum Google will never match up with OSE but it's good to use both along with other backlink tools to cover all your bases.

Hope this helps!

[unionroom]

Hi David,

Thanks for your reply.

I'm concerned that on the competitor websites that we are evaluating using OSE, their websites' internal links are displaying much higher numbers than ours (27 vs ~300) even though our websites are of similar size. Could this possibly highlight an issue with our website structure (i.e. crawlers are having an issue finding ways back to the homepage via inner pages, even though we have three on each page around the website), or is this a case of MOZ crawling perhaps showing incorrect statistics?

I'm trying to eliminate the possibility of OSE's statistics being incorrect before we attempt to change the structure of the website and begin testing etc.

Thanks!

[DavidLee]

Anytime!

Website structure can play a part but also time timing of when sites are indexed. There can be various networking issues that can prevent our crawler and others from reaching certain pages. You can always run a crawl test to look for any possible errors which you will have time to correct before the next update: https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test

Also some pages may be blocked intentionally from robots.txt and no-follow tags.

[unionroom]

The crawl looks to be working correctly, as in it is finding all of the pages and posts that we would expect (approximately 300). It looks to be solely an issue with the number of internal links that OSE is saying the page www.unionroom.com has (27).

All but two of our inner pages, aside from the blog and accessibility, aren't listed on our internal link report for the homepage. This includes top level pages like services, about, contact etc, all missing.

The templates that we use for the blog and accessibility pages are identical to to what we use for other inner pages, so it's unusual that the others aren't listed.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.unionroom.com%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=internal&target=page&group=0

[DavidLee]

It's possible we may not have indexed those pages or they have a link back to www.unionroom.com within the source code. You can verify by putting those pages into OSE directly to see if they have been indexed and also verify the link is in the source code.

For example we do have /blog/ indexed but there isn't a link going back to the homepage as "www.unionroom.com"

[unionroom]

I ran some inner pages through OSE (/work and /contact) and both look to be indexed.

It's weird that you say 'For example we do have /blog/ indexed but there isn't a link going back to the homepage as "www.unionroom.com"' as this is one of only two pages (blog and accessibility) showing that DO link back to unionroom.com.

In summary:

• All inner pages are crawled.
• All inner pages (that we have tested) are indexed.
• All of our pages use the same template.
• OSE is stating that only two inner pages link back to the homepage (blog and accessibility).

[DavidLee]

To provide more detail there is a relative link back to the homepage though href="/" which our crawler doesn't work well with so having the full absolute path is recommended.

Here is a great resource that goes more in-depth about the differences: http://www.coffeecup.com/help/articles/absolute-vs-relative-pathslinks/

[unionroom]

Thanks for the link David, we will take a look through that.

I've quickly looked at some competitor websites and their home links are all href="/", so would I be correct in assuming that it if this affected our website it should also affect others in OSE?

[DavidLee]

Yep that is correct, which can be 50/50.