Which Moz Rank and I'm seeing External or both external and internal?

[RustyF]

I found this on the MOZ site.  It confused me.

"Whereas MozRank measures the link juice (ranking power) of both internal and external links, external MozRank measures only the amount of mozRank flowing through external links (links located on a separate domain). Because external links can play an important role as independent endorsements, external mozRank is an important metric for predicting search engine rankings."

In the tool bar and other places in Moz am I seeing the combo Internal or the External and how do I get to each?  Maybe I'm just reading this wrong.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Internal links do pass MozRank (and PageRank) and they do help you to rank, but they don't pass nearly the same amount of juice or ranking power as external links.

To that end, PA does use internal linking in it's calculation, though it's not as big of a factor.

[RustyF]

HAHA, yeah, it kind of thew me for a loop too. I've been putting way too much empahsis on mR.  Someone that is quite good with SEO explained it to me first and got it all wrong based on what I"m learning now.

When looking at the SEOMOZ tool bar and the link count. That is including internal links too?  I'm going to guess it does. Even Google Webmaster Tools does that when I look at links to my site in their interface, which is not often.  It does seem they give an option now for ONLY external. I don't recall.

It seems almost all tools do this, count the internal. Maybe I don't understand something here. I don't think that internal links do anything to improve search engine rankings other than helping Google find the content. And it seems like the sitemap would do a better job of that. But many SEO expert suggest that is a good idea, internal links to help Google find the content. I'm beginning to seriously doubt that. I'm going to ask another question on that top rather than delve into it here.

I know that PA uses mR to calculate a pages PA. so does it use external links only in that computation.

Thanks very much and it really is nice to see SEOmoz employees (i guess you're an employee) answer questions here. The support from you guys has been outstanding!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Rusty,

For a minute I had to shake the cobwebs out of my head to remember what External MozRank was.

For the most part, SEOmoz tools and Open Site Explorer hardly ever display External MozRank. Part of the reason is that the algorithm that calculates MozRank has been better improved over the years. You can still see External MozRank metrics, but they are hard to find. To do so, you need to use the Open Site Intelligence API.

It takes some technical know-how, but once you get the hang of it you can access all kinds of special metrics.

But this is more work than most people really need in thier lives. For the most part, if you concentrate on Page and Domain Authority, you should be just fine.

And we really need to update those descriptions. Thanks for the heads up!