Is the on-page link count a distinct count or a gross count?

[SpartzAlison]

My Crawl Diagnostic report is showing too many on-page links (~120-141). Is this a count of distinct links (i.e. example.com and example.com/?q count as 2)?

[bradwayland]

It is just a pure count of all the links regardless of where they point to.

[ThompsonPaul]

I certainly can't speak for Roger Mozbot (the crawler) but I've always assumed the Crawl Diagnostic just indicates gross link count - i.e. totaling up the number of hrefs on a page.

Otherwise the crawler would have to be following every link, which I don't think is likely.

More to the point, I just use that number for trending and as a threshold. If my report shows 140 on-page links, it could be as low as 90 or 100 when dupes are taken into account and it wouldn't matter - I'd still know I have too many.

Paul