Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
After some editing on a major page I accidentally deleted the opening BODY tag.
Also, the relational links on a high traffic page had ../ when it should have had ./ This was hard to catch because the ../ actually resolved correctly in IE6. The problem was when I ran a link checker it stumbles on it, shows a result like:
[example...] 404 not found
After fixing the BODY tag and the ../ I created a sitemap and submitted it.
I also have a 2 year old directory, PR6 human reviewed, no redirects, totally legit directory. On this directory I added a link to the above site on the menu bar. The reason is that the site (first one mentioned at the top) provides daily information that is very useful to the directory. But what I *should* have realized is that the first site is basically a different "theme" also, by putting it on the menubar I created about 8 thousand backlinks instantly.
I figured it lost PR due to 8k insto-backlinks, and the errors in the site.
What I did was remove the links. Fixed all the errors, and re-submitted the sitemap.
OK it seems to be working, traffic is back up to pre-blunder levels, and it is getting it's keyword rankings back in google. Everything seems OK now except for one thing.
Site: now shows all the urls :) (a good thing)
Link: shows nothing (used to show about 50) (a bad thing)
Related: shows nothing (used to show related site)(a bad thing)
Cache: now shows the homepage (it used to be blank) (a good thing)
Also in webmaster tools it is showing all the pages actually have PR now, and that google is actively crawling it.
My big question is Why is "Link:" and "related" showing no results found? Site: came back, and so did cache: so why not link: and related:?
Anyone else have a similar experience? If so how long does it take for Link: and related: to come back?
What you describe makes sense to me. The site and cache commands only deal with the pages on your website, and I believe they are going to be consistent with whatever Google has for your site at any given time.
The link and related commands, however, deal with the relationships between your site and others. In that sense, it is similar to PageRank. The PageRank visible on the toolbar and the backlinks you can see with the link: command are updated periodically by Google, and you'll usually see some sort of discussion here on WebmasterWorld when this happens.
I don't see too much discussion on the related: sites, but my guess is that this info is updated at the same time PR and backlinks are.
So all in all, don't panic, in big friendly letters. Give the system a month or two for an update, and you should see your links and related sites again.
Thanks
