In the Moz Site Crawl, what does "External Links" mean?

[Edward_Sturm]

I thought I knew what it meant but am finding instances where the value in the column, "Linking Root Domains" is greater than the value in the column, "External Links?"

Thanks!

[NickW816]

I have seen this before in Moz Open Site Explorer and the "Links" section of a Moz Pro Campaign as well. This appears to be an error and I believe can happen when Moz OSE counts a 301 redirect or a URL shortener (like goo.gl) as a linking root domain, but not as an External Inbound Link.

You are most likely still correct in your understanding if you were thinking that the linking root domain number is the total number of unique ".com's" that are linking to your website, where as the number of External Inbound Links are the total (according to Moz's data) number of links from all websites and pages, including all multiples on different ".com's".