Internal Link Counts in SEOMoz Report?

[beso]

Hi,

We ran a site diagnostic and it came back with thousands of pages that have more than 100 internal links on a page; however, the actual number of links on those pages seems to be far less than what was reported. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Phil

UPDATE:

So we've looked at the source code and realized that for each product we link to the product page in multiple ways - from the product image, product title and price. So we have three internal links to the same page from each product listing, which is being counted by the SEOMoz crawler as hundreds of links on each page.

But in terms of the Googlebot, is this as egregious as having hundreds of links to different pages or does it not matter as much?

[AlanBleiweiss]

have you viewed the source of those pages?  Looked for rogue links?  Or URLs embedded in scripts you thought were hidden from search bots?  There are all sorts of reasons for the reading that becomes clear when examining the source view (seen as Googlebot sees it).

[zharriet]

Are you counting links in drop-down menus and side navigation? I think they are counted in the Site Diagnostic.

[beso]

So we've looked at the source code and realized that for each product we link to the product page in multiple ways - from the product image, product title and price. So we have three internal links to the same page from each product listing, which is being counted by the SEOMoz crawler as hundreds of links on each page.

But in terms of the Googlebot, is this as egregious as having hundreds of links to different pages or does it not matter as much?

[vforvinnie]

I asked this same question a few weeks back and the answer I got is that Google and other engines should only be counting the first link as far as number of links on a page goes.  That makes me curious though about anchor text and which gets counted first.  So you may link to a page 5 times on a single page but only the first link is looked at.  Can anyone back this up?  I couldn't find any official stance regarding it but it makes sense for the exact reason above.  Lot's of sites are redundant with image linking and text linking, as well as side nav linking.

[beso]

Hi Vinnie,

Google only counts the first link in regards to Anchor text - although there appear to be ways around this if you care to do so, but for the average person, yes, only the first link:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/3-ways-to-avoid-the-first-link-counts-rule