WMT "internal links" show nav links but not paragraph links. OK?

[gouri]

I am seeing in WMT in the internal links section that the internal links for a page are the other pages that are located in the navigation menu.

The internal links going to a page from the body text of other pages on the site are not mentioned.

I have seen this for some time.

Are links in the navigation menu of a website going to a page on the website the only ones mentioned in the internal links section of WMT or should links from the body text of another page on the website going to a particular page also be mentioned?

< moved from another location >

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:05 am (utc) on Jul 3, 2012]

[tedster]

Your observation was something new to me. It's very interesting indeed. So I just double checked a couple of sites, and I definitely see both kinds of internal links: those in the standard navigation areas and those in the content areas. So now the question is why you're seeing what you do

The first thing I think of is a data glitch on Google's end.

The second is there could be something horribly wrong with the HTML of your page template that makes the content area not able to be indexed. I can barely imagine what that would be.

Sometimes many years ago, an unclosed quote in the attribute area or an unclosed angle bracket around an element area of a tag could make indexing go blank - at least until the error recovery routine could get its "balance" again.

I've seen that kind of error make entire paragraphs get skipped over, but never the full content area of every page. And I haven't seen it recently, at any rate. I think Google's error recovery improved a lot on this kind of error. But still, I would suggest validating your source code if you havne't already done that.

[lucy24]

My goodness. I have 59 internal links to piwik.php.

The second is there could be something horribly wrong with the HTML of your page template that makes the content area not able to be indexed.

But if a page shows up in searches, and still doesn't yield links...?

I thought I'd discovered an opposite case. I looked at the very bottom of my list, in an area where all the pages are dead ends that link only to one page. I know which ones have an extra.

Page B links to Gallery Page A and to Similar Page C (belonging to a different gallery) ... but Page C-- which should similarly show up with two links-- isn't listed at all. In fact I thought it wasn't indexed (it's only three short sentences) but there it is-- with a blasted little icon that says "You shared this". When? With whom? Is it because I forgot to sign out of GWT before doing the rigged search?

piwik.php isn't the only heavily linked page. Going in the other direction there are loads of pages linked from

:: drumroll ::

sitemap.xml. Grr. How do you put "noindex" on something that isn't html? :( Are they also letting people paw through my stylesheets?

[gouri]

The second is there could be something horribly wrong with the HTML of your page template that makes the content area not able to be indexed. I can barely imagine what that would be.

@tedster,

The pages are in Google's index, and they have cache versions.

They are not html validated, but they don't have a lot of errors. At one point, I believe that some of the pages were html validated, but I saw the same thing in WMT.

I have heard that with templates, sometimes it is hard to get html validation.

Based on what I have written, can you think of any other reasons that this might be happening and also, do you think that this could be affecting rankings?

I am not very familiar with this, and I would appreciate your help.

[gouri]

I remember once I had a link from the body text of one page going to another page and I had not written the url of the page being linked to properly, so if you clicked on the anchor text, it wouldn't take you to the destination page.

The way I found out about this is by looking at my WMT a couple of days later.

I am trying to understand why when I had a url that wasn't written properly I saw it in my WMT, but for internal links that I have in the body text of a page that when clicked on take you to the destination page, I am not seeing those in WMT?

The internal links that I do see in WMT are the ones from the navigation.

I would appreciate your thoughts.