g1smd - 11:30 pm on Oct 14, 2010 (gmt 0)

Yesterday, I initially thought the "internal links" and the "links from other sites" data was showing a refresh with new data, but it is actually just showing the old data sorted in a different way. The data has been very wrong for many months.

I have sites with hundreds of pages that (for the last 5 months) supposedly have many thousands or tens of thousands of internal pages linking to the root. That is not possible.

The numbers in the "internal links" reports are now more believable (in the last few days), but still not quite correct. They are now under-reported.

The list looks like there has been some new data folded in today, as the counts are going up.

As for the "links from other sites" data, there's still problems. The non-www version of the site is listed as linking to the www as if it were another site, and it is listed as if tens of thousands of links are pointing to various URLs on the www version of the site.

In reality, there are no such links, but there is a site-wide 301 redirect from non-www to www. It looks like that redirect is being misinterpreted in some way, and leading to an infinite (well many-fold more than "reality") link count being reported.

The linking data reported in WMT has been messed up for most of 2010. It reports many things that are just not possible.