Huge Swings In Webmaster Tools Link Reports

[HenryUK]

I noticed this morning that Google Webmaster Tools was reporting a drop in the number of external links for my large site, and that the number of pages linked had also dropped, to exactly 100,000.

Then I looked at my internal links, and saw that (while the number of links had actually gone up) there appeared to be the same limit on the number of pages in the report, eg 100,000.

This latter number was useful to me as it was another indicator as to how many pages on the site Google was actually aware of. Now a limit appears to have been applied.

Just me, or is anyone else seeing this?

[curioustoddler]

My sites are also showing thousands of backlinks for many pages and most of them from content scrapping sites.These appear to be spammy pages where some searched google for many terms and created search result pages on the fly and we got thousands of backlinks from those pages.

[engine]

Google Caffeine results in revamp of backlink data [google.com] Yes, we revamped the data behind the backlinks feature in Webmaster Tools -- it has started using more data from "Caffeine" for some sites and is planned to continue with a bit more data in the next week or so. The goal is to have more fresher & up-to-date data there :-).

[olias]

Well this is all very unhelpful, my external links had been at 1,139 for most of June and I was hoping to see a slight increase at some point. So just checked and I apparently now have just over 600,000! In fairness downloading the actual links they are willing to tell me about yields 1,700 - that sounds a bit more like it!

[nethead]

same here...one one site it jumped from 2900 to 30525. no change in traffic or serps to that leads me to believe that its an error.

[nethead]

wow and another site went up from 5900 backlinks to 3,348,067 ? what the heck is going on here? wish serps changed as well :)

[Hissingsid]

I don't know about fresher. Mine smells like garbage.

Google WMT has gone from reporting about 30% of what is on Siteexplorer to 300%.

[cabowabo]

Mine are way off too. I wonder if any slime ball marketers will take screen shots of their GWT account and come out with a "link building" course.

God, I hope not.

[Rlilly]

My sites backlinks also went into the 10s of thousands. However most from a site which I have not had a link from for 10 months. It must be a temporary glitch..

[Brett_Tabke]

This is excellent. Much improved.

[g1smd]

Really?

I see total garbage for internal link reports. Incorrect link counts, at least five times what they should be, whilst the reported number of listed pages that have internal links pointing at them has halved.

[Sally Stitts]

Barry over at Search Engine Round Table confirms through Google that this is a real and lasting change. COOL!

On one site, I went from 3,300 links to 31,000 links.
One page - from 1,700 links to 8,800
One page - from 256 links to 7,700
One page - from 128 links to 5,900
One page - from 243 links to 1,200.

On June 30, the sum did not add up (6,000 missing).
On July 1, the total now adds up nicely (with the same expected minor discrepancies as before - 400 missing).

I had no idea that some of these pages had that many incoming links. Fascinating. This kinda changes some of my focus.

Go CHECK your links at Google Webmaster Tools. You might be amazed!
.

[Mikey85]

My large website has been hit by the mayday update and backlinks are now from 130.000 to 900.000 (with a lot links from another domain of us, wich accidentaly runs the content of our main site too)

[Hissingsid]

I just chose a page that has gone up in count 10 times and visited some of the new pages that are listed as linking back. None of them had a link back. They look like some form of screen scrapper that is scraping transient links, for example comments on a blog that show on that blogs home page as a recent comment, or maybe being fed that by the blog. So now we have transient copies of transient links.

It seems to me that all of this speed to index has some downsides.

Cheers

Sid

[dickbaker]

I know I had more than the 4,000 or so links that WMT showed a couple of weeks ago, but I'm 99.9999% certain that I don't have 500,000 links, which is what it's showing today.

[ken_b]

Yeah, it's like a long list of scrapers, with a few legitimate links tossed in for good measure.

These link counts are crazy. But no more than those shown by the "link:" operator, maybe you have to average the numbers.

The WMT number is more like the total number of results listed when I do a simple search for www.example.com.

Odd.

[g1smd]

Hmm, a site with 3000 pages, has internal links from 11000 internal pages. There aren't 11000 internal pages that could link internally. Oh, and when you click for a list, there's just 200 in the list.

It's broken.

[robdwoods]

We're seeing a huge jump for all pages as to the number of links. In looking at the lists of backlinks many of the new ones being reported are very low quality. It looks like Google is just giving us more insight into the link graph. I wouldn't expect any ranking changes (a few people in the thread have mentioned that). These are links that Google already know you had, now they are just telling you that they know... I do wish they'd give a little more info about the links, particularly the date the link was first discovered.

[aristotle]

many of the new ones being reported are very low quality

Most of the new ones I see are worthless spam links created randomly by automated methods. Apparently millions of them are continually being created by scraping from Google's own SERPs. After a day or so they are replaced by new ones. Maybe whoever creates them is able to get a little traffic from Google to these temporary spam pages.

[Robert Charlton]

many of the new ones being reported are very low quality

That's also long been true of a great many of the inlinks reported by Yahoo Site Explorer, and also of those reported by private link indexes. Most backlinks aren't very good.

[rocco]

I noticed another huge change in the backlinks... it seems now a bit closer to the truth, but there still seems some processing going on. Very interesting to watch.

[g1smd]

I get reports for both the www and non-www version of every site.

There's been a huge change in the internal links reported for the non-canonical version of the site.

The site was previously in the root of the non-www and without a canonical redirect (all internal pages linked to non-www URLs). It was moved to the www (i.e. all internal links were changed to point to the www version of each page) and the non-www to www redirect added, about 7 months ago.

WMT has been reporting the non-www internal linking (that no longer exists) ever since then. The numbers dropped quite dramatically in the first month or two, and have then remained 'stuck' for many months since.

Finally most of those non-canonical URLs have recently dropped out of the list, only to be replaced with lists of internal non-www linking that reflect how the site was when it was in a non-www sub-folder more than a year previously.

The www reports are completely whacked and have been so for over a week now. They continue to report vastly over-inflated numbers for the www internal linking, as I mentioned in an earlier post.