OK I'll try again.... Linking root domains and external links

[JemRobinson]

I'm new to the crawl test tool, I think I know what is meant by external links and linking root domains but I need to check. If there are 500 external links and 50 linking root domains does that suggest the essentially those 500 links are coming from 50 root domains?

If yes, then what would 1000 linking root domains and 100 links mean?

Or am I completely wrong in my assumptions and if so, can somebody point me in the right direction?

Thank you.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi Jeremy,

Good question - in the crawl diagnostics, the number of links is the number of links from your page to other pages - these links can be both internal and external. It's a measure of the total number of links on your page, and tries to show how the value of your page gets diluted through your various links.

The next two columns, of page authority and linking root domains, tries to show the strength of the page in question. Linking Root Domains is the number of root domains pointing in to that page. I believe it includes both internal and external - thus, a page with 1, usually means it's only being linked to internally. On this particular crawl test, number of links is the number of OUTGOING links on the page crawled, whether those are linking to another page on your site or to external domains. Page authority is a measure of the strength of your page, on a scale of 1-100, and linking root domains is the number of domains pointing to your site.

They show you the strength of the page because if the page is strong, though there are more links on the page, this may still be ok, because the page is stronger and has more juice to spread across the site/web.

Mark