Help problem solving with Google search

Links not being counted

[Leva]

I have a site that until recently had a PR of 6 but has recently dropped to 5 with no real explanation. Google is only showing 100 backlinks to the site, which has been in existence for over ten years. Up until recently there were hundreds of links. Also, it doesn't show any "related" sites when related sites used to pull up several dozen links.

There are multiple valid links that I know of from high-PR sites, including one from a PR8 site that is *very* legitimate, that do not show up for this site.

*Yahoo* shows 9223 links to this site, for a point of comparison. They are linked both to the main page and to content -- the site is a news site for a niche market and some of the articles tends to be link bait.

There is nothing that should cause a penalty. It's strictly a white hat site -- I try to do everything by the book. Almost all the content is original -- I have a writer on staff and buy content from assorted freelancers. (And religiously check for dups.)

The *only* thing I can think of is that there's a 301 redirect from widget.com/* to widget.com/news/. However, even direct deep links to content are not showing up.

Could the 301 redirect be the problem or should I be looking at something else?

This has been a problem for about two months ... at first I thought Google was just updating but it's been going on far too long for that. Anyone want to speculate on what I should be looking for? I'm at a loss because I've exhausted my knowledge, unless it's the 301 redirect ...

[moussa854]

Try to include both the site and the redirect in the google webmaster and follow the progress, your links might has been split?

[tedster]

There are two kinds of "problems" with Google search - one is the accuracy of their reporting and the second is whether ranking and traffic are affected. It is very important to differentiate, because many times their reporting functions change or get flakey, but ranking and traffic are not affected.

Points to take into account here:

1. Many sites saw PR fall by one on the toolbar last month.

2. Matt Cutts announced that they had changed the way they were weighting backlinks.

3. Links are never reported completely - or anywhere near completely. Google just shows a sampling and they switch out what they show every so often, even though they still use all the links they know about in calculating rankings.

4. If you have a Webmaster tools account, you will usually see more of your backlinks in there - but still not all of them.