Google's only following the first 15 links from this page?

Why would this be?

[flicker]

There's a site that links to one of my internal pages from its "cool links" page. I noticed this in a referral, but the site doesn't show up in my backlinks. Curious, I investigated, and it looks like the first 15 links on that links page are getting counted as backlinks for the sites they point to. The other 20 or so links on the page are not.

Does anyone have any idea why this would be? I know for a fact that Google follows at least 50 links off of my own pages. *scratching head in confusion*

[rfgdxm1]

I'd say assume this is a Google fluke unless this situation stays the same for many months. Perhaps Googlebot just ran out of time in a crawl when it found that page to count all links?

[flicker]

Huh... well, I'll try to remember to check on it in a few months and see if it's still that way. Just seemed odd to me. (-:

[Powdork]

are the links on the page listed in alphabetical order, or does it look as though they have just been added over time to the bottom of the page and the last twenty are newer than the top fifteen?

[flicker]

Alphabetical order. I start with N. (-: It looks like the links page itself has been there for 6 months or longer. I guess Google just got bored partway through crawling it, or something. :-D

[athinktank]

Powdork, I am interested in where you are going with the alpha order hunch? I have many pages that are organized alpha for u.i. reasons. Also, have one such site that is not getting deep crawled... co-winki-dink, I think not.

[PatrickDeese]

Have you checked the cached version of the page? Perhaps your link after the latest crawl to that page.

[steveb]

If the page is over 101k, that would explain it. Sounds like it isn't, but that would be one explaination.

[PatrickDeese]

> If the page is over 101k, that would explain it.

I can show you numerous examples of backlinks which show after the 101K threshold, ie where the cached version shows no backlink, but the page is listed as a backlink for the site.

[steveb]

So what? There are numerous examples where backlinks don't show after the 101k cache stops.

[PatrickDeese]

Okay - show me yours and I will show you mine. Sticky a couple examples to me.

[Powdork]

athinktank,
I meant nothing like that, just trying to determine if maybe flicker's link was not picked up cuz it hadn't been there long enough.

[flicker]

Hmm, well I used the wayback machine to look at the page's history, and it looks like the link to my site was added three months ago. However the link just above mine was there a year ago, and it doesn't get the backlink credit either. It looks like all of the first 15 links get the credit and all of the ones thereafter do not. The page is less than 20k.

It's not a burning issue, for me or for anyone else featured on this cool-links page I'm sure. It's just rather odd. I've never seen anything like that before. It's like Google gave up on following the links less than halfway through.

[Powdork]

check the code. Some may be standard html, some maybe linked via js redirect in an external file.

[g1smd]

Not only might some of the links be done with javascript (so non-spiderable, or at least no backlink credit will be applied) or using a redirector script, but if it is simply that only the first 15 links are followed, then I would look for an obvious typo in the HTML code such as a missing quote " on the end of a link URL, a missing closing tag like </a>, or something similar.

Stick that page through [validator.w3.org...] and see what you get.