Links being reported in Webmaster Tools

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

Are the Total Links To Your Site, as reported in GWT, purely external inbound links ?

Since these links are usually, as far as i can tell, much higher in number than any other link reporting tool and hence, i presume, more accurate, why don't services such as Moz etc include this in reporting ?

I know its just a total number and link quality is whats important not quantity, but i would have thought interesting to show in reporting in conjunction with link quality info such as is already reported. Since most backlink reporting tools do show a total but always much much lower than that reported in gwt (i think)

All Best

Dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

thanks Michael !

would be great to have the GWT total in MA reports too for general info, even better if GWT included some sort of link quality metrics as well

All Best

Dan

[MichaelC-15022]

What it really comes down to is this:  how deep does each of the link-reporting tools crawl?  In my experience (lately, from doing a lot of penalty recovery work for clients), I'm seeing GWT crawl a fair bit deeper than most of the other tools out there, so their number is going to be higher.

There's a lot of pages out there that really aren't content pages:  things like reply-to URLs, media-only pages in WordPress, standalone blog comment pages, etc.

When it comes to link juice, these kinds of pages have really almost nothing to give to a page they link to, so for the most part, whether you ignore the bottom 1% or bottom 10% of links to your site, you're not missing anything that matters.  The exception to this would be a penalty situation, e.g. where there's a bunch of blog comment spam on really, really weak sites....Google is going to want to see that stuff cleaned up, even though it's not really contributing anything of significance to PageRank.