Google Webmaster Tools - Where Did My Links Go?

[Sally Stitts]

Recently, GWT reported that I have over 50,000 incoming links to one of my sites.
Now, it reports 8,000 links. The page with the most incoming links had over 11,000.
Now, GWT DOESN'T EVEN LIST the page any more, in the incoming links area.

The page still is #1 for the appropriate search terms, so the page has not been penalized in the SERPS.

My question - Why should we even screw around with GA and GWT, when the data is so frequently from outer space? It is a total waste of time, relying upon and fretting about parameters that are so clearly bogus. I haven't even visited Google Analytics in months, because of the WILDLY inaccurate data. What is the purpose of giving us totally bogus data, month after month?

I'm about ready to follow the advice of Google Search, and remove GA as just one more unnecessary lookup.
.

[wheel]

You could try complaining to customer service. Or asking for refund :).

Here's the way to look at GA:
Say I work with your competitors, helping them advertise online. Would you give me access to your logs for free? No? Would you give me access to your logs for $50/month? Still no? How much before you give me your log files? Probably not at all.

Now ask yourself how much you'd be willing to pay for an analytics service that doesn't use your data to help your competitors.

In short, you're getting the right attitude. GA is the biggest trogan horse on the web today.

[g1smd]

The numbers are crazy wrong in so many different ways. The data integrity is shot to pieces.

Be aware that the backlink count is not the raw number of links to a particular URL, it also includes any 301 redirects that end up at that target URL.

[tedster]

I think it's been too long since a real practicing webmaster had anything to do with "Webmaster" Tools. It's been stuck in buggy beta mode forever and Google absolutely can do better. Of course, Bing has even less to brag about ;(

[gldmeier]

I never found the numbers there too reliable.

[Sally Stitts]

From 50,000 to 8,000 to 31,000 today July 6.

My top page which was at 11,000, then disappeared, is now at 15,000.
From my hippy daze, far out!

A random number generator would be more accurate, and more consistent.

Why even bother looking?
I now look for entertainment value only, because it will be some other WILD, divergent number next time.
Oh, well. It is what it is - for entertainment only.
.

[anteck]

A lot of my sites now have no or 1 or 2 links listed. They used to have thousands... It's bogus data.

[courier]

A few months ago I went from a steady 2 year 4,000 incoming links to 100,000 showing in my GWT, which was quickly followed by a -50 penality. In Yahoo it still shows 4,000.

I have always thought the -50 was for the ammount of links showing in GWT, even though they were and still are obviously wrong.

[Planet13]

I have always thought the -50 was for the ammount of links showing in GWT, even though they were and still are obviously wrong.

did you point that out to google in a reinclusion request?

[courier]

did you point that out to google in a reinclusion request?

Yes I did, they just gave me the standard reply 'if your site complies to Googles guidelines it will be included again' I have not bothered again, I have moved on with other projects and if it comes back in the future it will be a bonus.

I have just logged into my GWT account, and 6 months later Google tells me I still have 103,565 links - Yahoo still says 3,977.

[g1smd]

Canonical non-www to www redirects are "counted" as "links from an external site". That can also inflate the numbers.

[courier]

Canonical non-www to www redirects are "counted" as "links from an external site".

I have been thinking this and perhaps other items may inflate link numbers, but would my 2,200 page site with www. redirects make 100,000 links?

I would still be of the opinion something went wrong at that time and by awarding this number of links in my account threw up an automatic -50 penality. The unfortunate thing about it all is, no contact, there is no-one who I can just talk to on a one to one basis in Google and tell them how I think this may be reading wrong.

[g1smd]

I dunno, but I have seen a 3000 page site that supposedly has 90 000 links from non-www URLs on the same domain.

[flanok]

I have mentioned this is an earlier thread but no response.

I think it has to do with non-cached pages.

Around a third the pages within one of my sites no longer have a cached version of each page.

The title tag and description tag is still within Googles index, but when you look at the cached verion of that page I get this message.

Your search (mysite) did not match any documents.

I get the same results when looking at many other sites throughout Google.

So in opinion, if Google no longer has a content cached version of many pages in its index , it no longer can count any links leaving those pages.

it would not surprise me that the reason you have dropped in link quantity, is many of the pages you originally had links from, are no longer cached in the index, even though they still physically exist and show title and description tags.

It is however also possible, that what we see is not what Google sees.
We dont see cached pages, so we dont see the links in WMT's, but maybe they are still counted using their own internal cached data.

In fact my undertanding of Panda is that if you have suffered content wise you rankings drop like a stone to no-where. But if like me you have just lost 5 or 6 places over every page, it is more likley to do with losing links, or losing cached pages that have links within.

I hope that in time, all these pages will be re-cached and the links counted again.


My opinion only.