Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Abnormally high internal link reported in Google Search Console not matching Moz reports
-
If I'm looking at our internal link count and structure on Google Search Console, some pages are listed as having over a thousand internal links within our site.
I've read that having too many internal links on a page devalues that page's PageRank, because the value is divided amongst the pages it links out to. Likewise, I've heard having too many internal links is just bad in general for SEO. Is that true?
The problem I'm facing is determining how Google is "discovering" these internal links. If I'm just looking at one single page reported with, say, 1,350 links and I'm just looking at the code, it may only have 80 or 90 actual links. Moz will confirm this, as well. So why would Google Search Console report different? Should I be concerned about this?
-
Hi Jeffrey! Did zeus1956's response help? We'd love an update.

-
First of all Google says 100 links per page but that is not etched in stone.I'm in the real estate industry and sometimes that is a very hard deal to accomplish. But the closer you can get to 100 links per page the better off you will be.With all programs you will find that they are not correct in numbers. If these links are on your home page then maybe you should look at your navigation bar and sidebars for excessive links. If this is where there coming from try making directory pages and link to that page. That will cut down on your link profile. Also having an enormous amount of links in your navigation bars will defiantly hurt your rankings. One of my clients had over 1700 links on the homepage and after restructuring the links we moved from page 9 to page 4 overnight and we still had 476 links on the home page.
This next statement you might not like. I do not rely on Google console,or Moz,but a combination of these programs plus 3 more I use to determine which direction I need to go in. Google console will be the most accurate but on the flip side it may be reading other information that you are not taking into account. You can narrow it down from the info I gave you above about home pages.I hope this information was helpful for you.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best redirect destination for 18k highly-linked pages
Technical SEO question regarding redirects; I appreciate any insights on best way to handle. Situation: We're decommissioning several major content sections on a website, comprising ~18k webpages. This is a well established site (10+ years) and many of the pages within these sections have high-quality inbound links from .orgs and .edus. Challenge: We're trying to determine the best place to redirect these 18k pages. For user experience, we believe best option is the homepage, which has a statement about the changes to the site and links to the most important remaining sections of the site. It's also the most important page on site, so the bolster of 301 redirected links doesn't seem bad. However, someone on our team is concerned that that many new redirected pages and links going to our homepage will trigger a negative SEO flag for the homepage, and recommends instead that they all go to our custom 404 page (which also includes links to important remaining sections). What's the right approach here to preserve remaining SEO value of these soon-to-be-redirected pages without triggering Google penalties?
Technical SEO | | davidvogel1 -
Google Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?
We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url). Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?
Technical SEO | | woshea0 -
Should internal links in my table of contents be tagged as nofollow?
Hi All, I have the LuckyWP Table of Contents plugin installed. I recently noticed that you can tag your internal links with and nofollow. I understand that it's always a good idea to link internally and to pass link juice to my own content. But with detailed posts that have over 20 headings, I'm thinking that internal linking for headings may actually hurt me because it takes my links well above 100. Any ideas what the best practises are in this scenario? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nomad_blogger0 -
Google Search Console "Text too small to read" Errors
What are the guidelines / best practices for clearing these errors? Google has some pretty vague documentation on how to handle this sort of error. User behavior metrics in GA are pretty much in line with desktop usage and don't show anything concerning Any input is appreciated! Thanks m3F3uOI
Technical SEO | | Digital_Reach2 -
Hide sitelinks from Google search results
Does anyone have any recommendations on how you can tell Google (hopefully via a URL) not to index that page of a website? I have tried through SEO Yoast to hide certain sitemaps (which has worked to a degree) but certain functionalities of Wordpress websites show links without them actually being part of a "sitemap" so those links are harder to hide. I'm having an issue with one of my websites - the sitelinks that Google is suggesting are nowhere near the most popular pages and I know that you can't make recommendations through Google not to show certain pages through Search Console. anymore. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Desktop & Mobile XML Sitemap Submitted But Only Desktop Sitemap Indexed On Google Search Console
Hi! The Problem We have submitted to GSC a sitemap index. Within that index there are 4 XML Sitemaps. Including one for the desktop site and one for the mobile site. The desktop sitemap has 3300 URLs, of which Google has indexed (according to GSC) 3,000 (approx). The mobile sitemap has 1,000 URLs of which Google has indexed 74 of them. The pages are crawlable, the site structure is logical. And performing a Landing Page URL search (showing only Google/Organic source/medium) on Google Analytics I can see that hundreds of those mobile URLs are being landed on. A search on mobile for a longtail keyword from a (randomly selected) page shows a result in the SERPs for the mobile page that judging by GSC has not been indexed. Could this be because we have recently added rel=alternate tags on our desktop pages (and of course corresponding canonical ones on mobile). Would Google then 'not index' rel=alternate page versions? Thanks for any input on this one. PmHmG
Technical SEO | | AlisonMills0 -
Fake Links indexing in google
Hello everyone, I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice. So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page. Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)
Technical SEO | | mshowells0 -
Tool to search relative vs absolute internal links
I'm preparing for a site migration from a .co.uk to a .com and I want to ensure all internal links are updated to point to the new primary domain. What tool can I use to check internal links as some are relative and others are absolute so I need to update them all to relative.
Technical SEO | | Lindsay_D0