Google Webmaster Tools - weird inbound link counts

[canuckseo]

Before I start let me say i know - GWT can be flaky at most times but I've found it is a pretty decent indicator of things - even if the numbers are not 100% accurate.

that being said I'm seeing lots of my sites lost most of their links over the weekend, according to WMT. Sites that had several million links now have just a few thousand.

But not all sites appear to be affected - there are some that went up, some dropped slightly but there are many that appear to have links wiped out.

I'm hoping its a temporary bug, but has anyone else seen this?

I don't know - seems like there's lots of little bugs creeping up in google lately that - such as the page cache still being broken almost a month after i first noticed it - [webmasterworld.com ]

plus other wierd stuff - this just seems to be the latest google bug?

[proboscis]

Yes, my inbound link counts are completely different after being about the same for a long time. I was wondering if it was just me.

[g1smd]

WMT has a huge number of bugs and features. It's difficult separating out which are which.

Another factor is that Google probably doesn't want you to know exactly what and how much is indexed, what is counted as a link, and so on.

[lucy24]

Same here, allowing for difference in orders of magnitude ;) The survivors include at least two hotlinks-- apparently from sites nobody ever visits, as I don't recognize the names-- and a whole set of spurious links. That is, the kind you create yourself when you reply to a blog posting-- surely one of the most obvious kinds of non-link to find and delete? I have no idea what distinguishes the surviving hotlinks from the many others that I find in my logs on a daily basis.

[rlange]

canuckseo wrote:
I'm hoping its a temporary bug, but has anyone else seen this?

I'm not seeing it at the moment, but I did see it last month or so; nearly 200,000 external links dropped to a few thousand. It only lasted about a day, though, then it was back to normal.

--
Ryan

[lucy24]

Same here. I thought it might be a legitimate crackdown, because way at the bottom of my "now you see them, now you don't" list is an ancient link from my son's site :) (This detail is not knowable by g###,* but we've got the same last name and we share a hosting plan.)


* Unless their robots are very good at parsing Forums posts, in which case they know it now. In fact I should sneak a look at his logs**, because the people who arrive via his link were probably looking for me in the first place.

** Today's Internet: Where mothers unhesitatingly steal their sons' searches. ;)

[rlange]

I'm seeing this again today on the same site I was referring to in my previous post. It's worse this time, though; from approximately 200,000 external links down to just under 750.

Crazy.

--
Ryan

[canuckseo]

Just thought I'd update - it's been a few days and the sites that were missing links are now back, however others are missing links - down from almost 2 million to less than 20,000. So either Google is doing a backlink update, or WMT is cycling through something I'm not sure.

Bun in either case things seem to be returning after a few days - link wise anyways.

[KHWeb]

Same here..I just spotted a big drop on WMT "links to your site" as well...for the past month or so it has been 700K and today it dropped to less than 40K.

[bramley]

Just noticed my inbound links have dropped from ~25,000 to 3 !

[KHWeb]

Links came back today to 700K and now I can see that overall the social sites domains are listed higher up...so they appear for me within the first page now

[RoyalChina]

Our links on WMT are very stale. We removed some paid links about 10 months ago and those links still appear in our link profile. Some sites are already dead, and Google still count them as our incoming links. Weird.

[indyank]

Susan confirmed it as a bug and that they have fixed it now.But as some of you observed, the following are happening very frequently in the last few months (in 2011).

1) Crawl errors reported in bulk for some strange urls or for urls that existed several years ago.
2) Bugs with "Links to your site".