Webmaster Tools problems

Links reported but not shown

[Mokita]

In the Links tab for one of our sites Google reports 46 external links, supposedly 36 to the home page and 10 scattered over 6 other pages. When I click on the 36, I am only shown 26 links. But worse than that, when following the links to details for all the internal pages (including one that supposedly has 4) I get "No links found".

So overall it is only showing 26 out of the 46 it says it has found.

I haven't kept any record of previous times I've looked at the links, bit I know there were lots more reported for internal pages.

It seems odd to list a link for a page then say there are none!

Also, a second problem, Google has not requested the Sitemap since 2 March. It usually collects it every couple of days.

Yesterday I did a fairly major site update and added 2 new product pages. So I ran the Sitemap tool via a Cron job with the "search engine notify" turned on (usually I leave it off). Normally Google will collect the latest sitemap.xml within seconds, but still hasn't done so, and it's about 2 hours since it was pinged.

Is anyone else seeing anything similar to these two problems?

[rustybrick]

Check again, Google did a partial update and the update appears to be done now.

[futureX]

5th and before: showing 409 links and showing all 409 links and their locations
6th: showing 2672 links but not showing any locations
7th: showing 2672 links and 2673 links and their locations

I would just give it a few days, google seem to update it incrementally.

[Mokita]

Many thanks for your replies.

Check again, Google did a partial update and the update appears to be done now.

I just checked again (more than a day after I first noticed the problems) and nothing has changed.

The Sitemap was last downloaded on March 2 (I also checked the logs to verify that). Plus there is still the same weird discrepancies with the number of external links being reported.

Another odd thing about the internal pages being shown in the summary as having external links - as far as I know none of them do. Yet pages which actually do have incoming links (which were shown correctly about a week ago) are not mentioned.

[Mokita]

Googlebot seems to be trying to make up for lost time - it requested the Sitemap twice yesterday (after I posted) and twice again today <yay>! They have also crawled the two new product pages.

But the weirdness with the reported external links persists. I guess only time will tell with that issue - but collecting our latest Sitemap and crawling new and changed pages is far more important.