Understanding page and subdomain metrics in OSE

[meterdei]

When using OSE to look at the **Total External Links **of a websites homepage, I dont understand why the page and subdomain metrics are so different.

For example, privacy.net has 1,992 external links at the page level and 55,371 at the subdomain level. What subdomain? www redirects to privacy.net. And they have 56,982 at the root domain level - does that mean they have around 55k deep links or what?

[meterdei]

Thanks Ryan, that exactly the information I required.

[RyanKent]

Using the privacy.net example you shared, there is no subdomain. Privacy.net is only using their root domain, http://privacy.net. All the data is for the root domain. If the address was www.privacy.net, then data could either apply to the "www" subdomain, or the root domain. There are an infinite number of possible subdomains. Some common examples might be blog.privacy.net or sales.privacy.net.

The page metrics in OSE for privacy.net show 2,043 links from 881 root domains. In other words, there are 2,043 visible links to the url http://privacy.net.

On the other hand, the subdomain metrics (or root domain in this case) apply to the entire privacy.net site. For example, on of the site's internal pages is http://privacy.net/internet-cookies/. The subdomain metrics add up all the links to the home page, the /internet-cookies page and every other page on the entire website.

With the above understood, your math is accurate. The site has 55k links to internal pages. Many of the links (17k+) go to this page: http://privacy.net/password-management/

[Thommas]

Hi meterdei an example of a subdomain would be  blog.mydomain.com

The OSE gives you the option to check all links pointing to a specific page, all links pointing to a  subdomain and all links pointing to root domain.