Google Search Console problem: internal links are shown as external

[doc_z]

I'm having a problem with one of my sites in the Search Console: internal links are shown as external ones. At "Links to Your Site" "Who links the most" Google show me 8,891,136 links - internal links which are treaten as external ones. All of my 5 navigation links at the top are treated as external links. These links are of the type "/example/". All links within the content ("/some-other-page.html") are handled correctly.

My website is more than ten years old and I didn't had any problems in the past. The site is on a subdomain. The site is accessible via https but is having a canonical tag with http. I'm using Cloudflare since 1 year.

Anyone else who have seen this or having an idea?

(As long as Search Console is having a problem it's fine. However, I fear that these links are treated as external links in the ranking algorithm.)

[Andy Langton]

If you click "More" under "Who links the most" and on the next page choose "download more sample links", does the downloaded data throw any light on it?

[doc_z]

No, "more" shows:

Domains | Links | Linked pages
mydomain.tld | 8,891,136 | 56,727

When I klick on the domain "mydomain.tld" I get;

Top 1,000 pages linked from | Total links | Total linked pages
mydomain.tld | 8,891,136 | 56,727

Your pages | Links
/subdir1/ | 159,472
http: //sub.mydomain.tld/ | 81,198
/subdir2/ | 50,000
/page1.html | 1,451
/page2.html | 967
/page3.html | 911
/page4.html | 854
/page5.html | 300
/page6.html | 286
/page7.html | 282
[...]

Even the sum doens't fit because it isn't 8,891,136.

When you're looking into details it's getting more weird...

[Andy Langton]

Domains | Links | Linked pages
mydomain.tld | 8,891,136 | 56,727

Which report are you looking at when you see this? The path I'm following is Search traffic >> links to your site.

[doc_z]

Which report are you looking at when you see this? The path I'm following is Search traffic >> links to your site.

It's a table on "Overview » All domains » mydomain.tld" at the top.

I think I solved the problem. the problem seems that "the site is accessible via https but is having a canonical tag with http".

All links are within the same protocol, i. e. all links from a http(s) page are to other http(s) pages. Normally, these pages having a canonical pointing to http. However, there are pages without canonical tag. When Google crawl such a page via https the links are pointing to https. However, the target pages have a canonical with http. Therefore, it seems like https pages linking to http pages.

I don't want to redirect all http pages to https, but I want that all pages are accessible via https. The solution is putting a canonical tag on all pages. So far there is no canonical tag for "noindex.follow" pages which seem the reason for all the trouble.

[JS_Harris]

You don't need to specify follow because that is default behavior but if you did it would be 'noindex,follow' with a comma, not a period.

http + https + cloudflare = brave guy :)

[doc_z]

The dot was just a typo (here). And of cource, there is no need to use follow in the robots meta tag - it was just to clarify what I was talking about.

I was forced to move: The story was that I was under attack [webmasterworld.com]. Therefore, I moved to Cloudflare. From this time my site was accessible via https. I thought there was no problem because I used links within the same protocol and all pages I was aware had a canonical tag to the http version. However, having sone non-important pages ("noindex,follow") without canonical tag caused the problem. I fixed it in the meantime. (Google told me that the link should not be a problem, but I fixed it anyway.)