What happened to all my backlinks?

Droped from hundreds to 47!

[paulewing]

I was wondering why my PR went from around 5 or 6 on pages to 4 on most, and I think I found why. I used to have around 300 backlinks, most from good quality related sites, and now I am only getting 47 through Google! Most are actually intrasite links and message board stuff. I checked AllTheWeb and they still list the links. I visited many of the sites I link to and they still have links back to me and their pages are basically the same as they have been for ages (their artists, not web designers). I went and checked there backlinks and some only have 5 or 6 listed, not listing mine by the way, when I know more than that exist. It is really weird. None of the sites are even treading close to the over optimized line, so penalties shouldn't be a problem.

[Arkon]

Paulwing: HAs the figure remained constantly around 47 backlinks? my site varies every few hours with a swing of about 100 (270-370) also PR changes from 4 to 5 & back again too.

[coco]

Paulewing, are all the internal links still showing up?

[minorleague]

Paulewing
I wish someone had an answer on this. All of our backlinks have been eliminated. We had 40-50 many over PR4
We were dropped from a PR4 to PR0 pretty much cleaned
house on us
Trying to scratch back as we speak
Good luck to you

[waterboss]

Hello all:

This have been going on for a while now-- to a lot of sites.

We originally have about 85 backlinks and home page pr is 5, now our backlinks dropped to around 20 and home page pr is 4, and of course, pr of all other pages dropped accordingly too.

Google is doing something that we wish someone can tell us!

[Yidaki]

What nobody of you mentioned yet is if your traffic / referers from google have also dropped.

[claus]

The dissapearing link phenom has been reported for a while, it's the first time i hear that PR is dissapearing with it. And with PR>4 incoming links as well. It sounds weird to me.

/claus

[waterboss]

Yes the backlinks have dropped together with pr. Not only for my site, I have watched many of my competitors' main pr dropped from 5 to 4.

However, to answer the important question-- the traffic did not decrease.

[paulewing]

There doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to which links are disappearing. Many of the internal links aren't showing up now, and almost all outside links. Many are from PR4 sites. I did notice that a lot of the sites that I link to that were PR4 or PR5 in the past have lost a point or two, so that explains some of them, but AllTheWeb still lists a number of links that are from at least PR4 sites that Goole Doesn't list anymore. These are all ones that used to be in the Google backlinks list.

[paulewing]

Forgot to add, that I don't think that either the drop in links or PR has had a major impact on either ranking or traffic for me. In fact I am doing better on some phrases than before.

[bether2]

What nobody of you mentioned yet is if your traffic / referers from google have also dropped.

My backlinks have been going up and down like a yo-yo, just as some others have described. My site was PR6 a couple of months ago, PR5 last month, and now is PR4.

During the summer, my traffic goes way down. My traffic from other referrers (for example, MSN) has recovered now that the summer is over. My traffic from google has not recovered.

Beth

[Skier]

Google reported links down by 90%. PR 6 -> 5-> 4.

Traffic better than ever. SERP position 2 for primary keywords, up from 3.

The increase in traffic and serp position is exactly the outcome that I would have expected, under the "old regime", for the work I have done on the site.

Under the new order, I get the results that matter, it's just that the PR and backlink reports don't give me warm fuzzy feedback anymore.

[plasma]

Whenever reporting fluctuating effects, please only use results from www2.google.com OR www3.google.com
Otherwise you will be served by random machines/indexes.

Could you please recheck your observations with www2 or www3?

[Skier]

My observations are for the period of the last few months.
Comments on the daily grinding of the Google machine is not very interesting reading anymore.