Subdomains are Now Counted as Internal Links Within Webmaster Tools

Google has reorganized the way they view backlinks within Webmaster tools. The idea is that they want to more accurately represent internal links versus external links. It used to be that only those links with the actual domain name, to include the www, were classified as internal and pretty much everything else was considered an external link. That is no longer the case. Google is now classifying subdomains and variations of your domain as an internal link. However, if you are on a subdomain but don't own the root domain, links to the root will be external. Take a look at the graphic Google provided below to better understand: