Www.site.com linking to pages www10.site.com

[Motava]

The root domain of the website in question is www.site.com but all subpages are on the subdomain www10.site.com (I'm pretty sure it's a subdomain, at least, used for load balancing?).

A funny thing happens on this site with the moz toolbar.

I visit a subpage, www10.site.com/articles/articletopic1

That page has a lot of links on it, all of them visibly going to the subdomain www10.site.com.

However, the moz toolbar shows some of them as Internal links and most of them as External links.

As far as I can tell, there is no real rhyme or reason to the difference between the links that are highlighted as Internal vs. External.

The link structures vary greatly:

Some are properly structured www10.site.com/blogs/category
And some are poor like www10.site.com/articles/show_articles.php?section=category1

So a couple questions here:

Does this subdomain www10 have a detriment on the rankings of subpages?
What could possibly cause the internal links on these subpages to be highlighted as external pages with the moz toolbar?

[donford]

Hello Motava,

So first lets understand what the www[number] actually means. It is not a technically a different sub-domain www is actually the sub-domain. The [number] is a way for content to be shared / mirrored on the www sub-domain usually for load balancing purposes. You can learn a little more about this by one of my favorite Mozzer's (Dr. Pete) with his article about the anatomy of a URL.

With that I have to question why your site would actually imbed the mirror into the link? I would want to examine this behavior as I have not seen it before the [10] should not be present in the link because it has nothing to do with the link other then where the content for www is delivered from. By specifically saying use mirror [10] it defeats the purpose of load balancing.

^^ Perhaps another Mozzer can shed some light on this

As to you question about whether www10 and www have different rankings the answer should be no. They are the same link for all intents and purposes. The way these links are being delivered are confusing to me, perhaps Rogerbot (Moz) is having the same confusion.

[Motava]

Thanks for the reply, Don. A good start to crack the case!

It's not my site but just a site I came across and am interested in learning more about, so these types of details I can't really provide.

[donford]

I'm curious myself. I have seen content delivered via mirrors but nothing that specifically called for a link to one. Seems illogical to me

I would suggest leaving the question open (unless somebody has a good answer) eventually a Moz staff will see it and hopefully help us out.

Good luck

[Abe_Schmidt]

Moz uses this rule when referring to each type of link: An external link is a link that points at an external domain and Internal links are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. They are commonly used in main navigation, for example.

If we are misreading links or mozbar is returning strange results, make sure to write in to help@moz.com so we can try to separate that out for you. Also, make sure to use Opensiteexplorer to filter those links and find out where they are coming from.

http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

http://moz.com/learn/seo/external-link

[Motava]

Hi Abe,

The links are definitely following these rules unless I'm really not understanding something.

I'll send help@ an email with the exact site and situation.

thanks,

Victor