Sudden increase in on-page links

[pupstar]

Within one week, the site crawl shows my on-page links going from ~10 to ~100+

Does anyone know of a rational reason for this? Sucuri shows my site is clean, so I don't think it's a hack. 10 seems too low to begin with anyway. Any ideas?

Thanks

[pupstar]

After a bit of time and investigation I think it was definitely just the first crawl not getting through all the pages. Thanks so much for all your help and extra suggestions

[ThompsonPaul]

Most welcome, Erin. If you're concerned about cloaked links, the other thing you can do is use Google and Bing Webmaster tools' "Fetch as Google/Bingbot. This lets you see exactly what the search engines see. I.e. the user-agent for the request is the Google crawler.

Often the way spam links are cloaked is that they are only shown to the search crawlers and not the regular user. You can also try searching for a term on your website and clicking through form the search results. Often spam is only shown to visitors coming from search as well. Just an additional couple of checks if you're concerned.

Paul

[pupstar]

That does help, thanks! I bet the initial count was off because there were a ton of other errors or something like that. I'm just a little paranoid because my site was hacked last year and the spam links were hidden from view, I couldn't even see them in the source code. Google Webmaster Tools caught the hack, though, and this time they say everything is OK.

Thanks for taking the time to respond! I'll check out the extension...didn't know about that either

[ThompsonPaul]

You could always just check the source of the page and count the hrefs to know how many links you actually have, Erin

Easier way would be to use the SEOMoz extension for Chrome or Firefox. It has a button for Analyze Page (looks like a magnifying glass) which has a tab for Page Attributes. That will show you the total count of internal and external links on a page. (It just does the manual counting for you, essentially)

You could also use a standalone page like http://linkcounter.submitexpress.com/ but the SEOMoz plugin/extension is so useful for many things that it's worth installing anyway.

Sounds to me like your first crawl didn't get through the pages thoroughly, but you're right to be careful. Especially in view of possible spam links, as you mentioned.

Hope that helps?

Paul