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My backlinks have been halving(ish) with each update. I was at 300 backlinks, 2 updates before & now at 90 backlinks.
Now people are reporting better backlink results. I know about only PR 4 showing, but I actually have over 800 sites linking to me. I was convinced that google was reducing my links because I had my link tracking directory Disallowed in robots.txt (stopping google from seeing some external links). But I changed that over a month a go & no change. I'm worried my last 6 months work will go down the drain eventually when all my backlinks dissapear.
any ideas anyone?
Quite a few people have reported diminishing backlinks over the last few months; the question on my mind is whether the rankings are sliding or not?
I begin to wonder if similar backlinks are being discounted now; whatever the reason it doesn't matter if it affects your competitors in the same way.
the question on my mind is whether the rankings are sliding or not?
On some sites YES and others No
I've seen some large portal type sites lose all the outgoing links and increase in pr.
I suppose if you had a site linking to 1000 sites and they all linked back to you google would have done you a great favour by dropping all the outgoing links, can't quite understand why, but it happen to one site we look after.
Dave
Now people are reporting better backlink results.
Actually most people are reporting worst backlink results.
My backlinks have improved simply because the last update was showing NO backlinks for my site!
But it's still not showing as many backlinks as it should.
I wouldn't worry too much about how many backlinks you have. First check how well you're ranking. Than check your PR. If you're ranking bad and your PR doesn't appear to be what it should be....than i'd worry and wonder why Google isn't finding my links.
Also, the backlink count before Dominic was a estimation - which in most cases was as much as double the actual number of backlinks above the threshold.
While most would react negatively toward losing backlinks. the fact is that the new estimate is much closer to the actual number than before. So if you are missing 40% of yours, your competitors probably are too, so all in all, it's pretty equal.
If this is the case, it would explain why one of my sites lost so much ranking. My competitors have 25-30 backlinks, but it estimated 45-60 for them. I had about 155 and it estimated about 300. They lost 20 -30 links, I lost 150.
I tried to find all 300 and list them, but no amount of searching would return more than about 140, which just happens to be my new count. I may have another 160 PR1&2 websites linking to me, but in the scope of things, if they are not counting my competitors 1's and 2's, then I don't mind if they don't count mine.
...sounds fair to me...
my3cents
Also, the backlink count before Dominic was a estimation
not sure that is true
Could I have a penalty on my sites and not know it? All this talk of the page rank bar messing up. Maybe my PR5 is PR0 but it's just not showing.
It seems the new and un-improved fresh/deep bot likes script generated links more than regular links.
I've had no new internal pages added that count towards the link total since the Feb deepbot. Even though it crawled them in March and April and then added them, Dominic removed them and they continue to be lost.
They show as being in the index, there just not being counted.
At least in my case.
It is a good for Google to ignore nastly links like guestbooks/link farms.
This is true, however in my industry it is not the case. I know for fact a competitor of mine dropped 4 duplicate sites that were crosslinked. He did so voluntary so as not get a penalty. We're talking at least 1000 links between them.
Instead of going down, they went up in count and the links that are getting counted are from an internal shopping cart. Some the pages are empty carts, no content at all. Some of these pages even show up in the SERP's
How is that fair or even good for Google?
Not only are my competitors NOT losing backlinks from the same sites, but most of the sites taking the top rankings have far less PR and backlinks than my site.
My PR has been everfluxing for days, and it's just getting worse now that the update is on. I've been scrambling to add pages and new links, but nothing seems to be working. Freshbot comes and ignores my changes. My links are all kosher, no farms or other no-no sites.
I'm also seeing a big increase in spam sites and sites using hidden links and text. Out of the top 10 listings for my #1 search term, half of them are using some kind of banned technique. I've made multiple spam reports to Google, but nothing has changed.
So what's a girl to do? If I keep playing nice, I'll soon be completely out of the rankings!
...The really nasty part is that unknown to their clients, the SEO also inserted 7-8 hidden links back to the SEO, so roughly half the PageRank that each customer had earned was getting routed to the SEO!...
