Open Site explorer shifting results - which to trust and not to trust?

[danielpett]

I was doing a search on Open Site Explorer, comparing my site with competitors in the field.

When looking under the Page Specific Metrics tab I first got the results that I had no internal links whatsoever, and 8 external links in total.

I had a page authority of 34, and so on.

Then I saw it suggested that my domain was redirecting to www.mydomain.com/ (a slash at the end), even though this is wrong. But I clicked the "see this url instead" and now the results changed a lot.

It now shows that I have 72 internal links, and 6 external links. And also a lower page authority of 28.

Now you might say it is because I changed the url to the one with a slash, but I changed back to the one without a slash (and now I don't get the message about the redirect).

What's up with open site explorer? What results should I trust?

[danielpett]

Peter,

Thanks for the reply. I tried deleting the question when I saw that it was an issue with Open Site explorer (read the updated question above), but as seomoz wouldn't let me (it only returned 404-page every time, I used the same question to type a new one.

Your answer was of great help anyways. But would be great if you could help me with the new one.

[PeterM22]

HI Daniel,

1. It's generally a best practice to not have more than 100 links on a page. In regards to internal and external, I'd say any combination is ok if it's natural.

2. Both are very important for ranking. It's often a good practice to have important pages linked to as closely as possible to the homepage.

3)Yes, that's an issue. How would users navigate round your site if there are no internal links? There may be issues with bots spidering your pages too.

Pete