Discrepancy in Competitive Link Analysis?

[zazo]

I currently have a campaign set-up that monitors a few competitors compared to our site. When I look at the Root Domain Metrics I see that Company A has 2,053 total external links, and Company B has 1,632 total external links.

I wanted to view these links in more detail so I ran Advanced Inbound Links reports.  The reports returned 432 results for Company A and 693 results for Company B.

Shouldn't these numbers match up with each other, or am I missing something?

Also, I noticed that in the Inbound Links analysis for my competitors there are a number of results listed that are not actually inbound links, but are internal links from there own site.

Is there a reason these are appearing?

I am having problems because I am trying to use this campaign to show the improvements in our site vs our competitors.  However, OSE shows dramatically fewer total external links for our site (about 260 vs 3200 in Webmaster Tools) and I cannot tell if the competitor data is accurate?

Thanks

[zazo]

I don't want to be rude, but my original question has not been answered.  Any thoughts?

[EricaMcGillivray]

Awesome. I'd figured that it might be the internal links.

[zazo]

Erica,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to this question.  Unfortunately, one question still remains unanswered.  I understand the limitations of OSE, and I can live with that for now.

However, I still do not get why the root domain metrics for my competitors show significantly more "total external links" than the Advanced Inbound Link report I ran.  I do not believe this has to do with filters, especially since OSE is reporting **fewer  **links when I run the advanced report.

It might be that I just don't understand the terminology, which is what I am trying to figure out.  What is the difference between Total External Links that I see in Competitive Domain Analysis for a campaign and the Advanced Inbound Link report analysis for the same domain?  Since the numbers are different I assume the terms are not the same, but I do not understand why.

EDIT - I figured out the internal links showing up issue, they are actually from a different language version of the companies site so they show up as www.example.de linking to www.example.com.

Thanks

[EricaMcGillivray]

OSE has filters on it that you can use to include or discard internal links. Check out those filters and see how they're set. Default includes internal links and also no-follow links. Depending on what info you're looking for.

OSE's data is populated with our Linkscape crawler. We do this so we can have the best data possible and try to only crawl quality links. Read more about our latest updated that included 58 billion URLs. That said, we do not crawl as many links as Google, so we do not report as much. However, by trying to crawl the best data out there instead of everything, we stand by our competitor comparison as the only backlinks we're not picking up compared to Google are low-value ones. No crawler -- even Google -- picks up every single backlink to your site.

Hope this helps.