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Abnormally high internal link reported in Google Search Console not matching Moz reports
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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?
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Hi Jeffrey! Did zeus1956's response help? We'd love an update.

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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.
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