getcooking - 1:11 pm on Jun 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the reply Tedster!

Here's another thought I had on my disappearing backlinks (which btw, are now down almost 25K since Panda 3.7). One thing I did in the last month or so (between Panda 3.6 and 3.7) was to add noindex tags to some of MY pages that had been hit by previous Panda updates.

How does Google handle a backlink from another site linked to a page on MY site that has a noindex tag (which actually has been out of G's index for several weeks before Panda 3.7). Since MY page isn't in the index, would Google drop that as a noted backlink to my site? The page still exists and Google knows that, but does that backlink lose all value? I'm not sure the pages I noindexed could account for 25K backlinks, but it's possible.

Again, I'm still not that worried about it since I'm not losing traffic or rankings, but just trying to figure out why the links are dropping incrementally like this. If it IS because I noindexed pages, then I'm thrilled. Because that *could* mean that the noindexing I did was actually factored into the Panda 3.7 update and possibly responsible for our 15% Panda recovery.