WMT link count has dropped, and indexed pages inconsistent

[SEOMike]

I'm seeing a decrease in link count for all of my sites today. Also, I'm seeing some where the report on pages indexed is odd. For example a site: search says Results 1-14 of about 12. Thoughts?

[Receptional Andy]

In terms of the link count, I find this changes pretty regularly: you can get an idea of how quickly by looking at the 'last found' date if you export all the external links to a spreadsheet. The implication of a drop, of course, is that some links that were repeatedly no longer found and thus are not counted any longer.

For site:searches, you have to be wary of this data, as inconsistency is a norm, rather than an odd behaviour. There are quite a few posts to that effect, see for instance, Google results for "site operator" [google.com] (restricted to this forum).

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 2:09 pm (utc) on July 3, 2008]

[SEOMike]

I do see link counts change regularly, but today the count is down across all my sites. Usually one goes up and one goes down etc. I guess we'll see what it looks like tomorrow.

[stevelibby]

<moved from another location>

for the past few months i have been watching the internal links in my webmaster tools, am there seems to lots of change and links come and go, can anyone give me any ideas as to why this may be?

[edited by: tedster at 5:23 pm (utc) on July 3, 2008]

[stevelibby]

i get updates almost every 12-15 days, if the page you are looking to promote is not in the internal links then forget it. This senario has been bugging me for the past few months, on off, i have yet to discover a patern, but im starting to think it may be a dup issue.