2 Million links in a month - says Google WMT

[azn romeo 4u]

Recently I noticed that I have gained 2+ million links in the span of one month with one of my sites. I currently got 6,516,185 total as of today when I logged on. 30 Days ago I started with 4.4 Million Backlinks.

Last year at around this time, I had 1,300,000 links.

Crawl stats sits at 18,928 pages per day average. High is 24,000. Though I only have like 17k pages. They are downloading about 180mb of data per day average. The crawl stats have all been normal.

Just the links are increasing so fast. I'm wondering how dangerous this is? I do not pay no one to do this, I do not xrumor or use any program. I believe I get all these links "legally". I run a "resource" site like statcounter but not in that category, but it leaves a link on a users page when they use my content. They have the choice to remove it if they want. I'm pretty sure statcounter has 100,000,000+ links.

As for what this has done to my traffic. Since last year I am up 2.5x, adsense earnings are up 3x. Also I think in my niche I'm an "authoritative site" (ranking #1 in many categories) However I'm afraid, that gaining this much links is gonna cause some problems. What do you guys think?

[tedster]

I think if it was going to cause you problems, they probably would already have show up.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Recently (4 weeks prior to recent November PR update) we gained around 0.2 million links as per WMT for one of our sites. It stayed constant till the PR update completed and then reduced (-50K) and now settled at +0.15 million from where it was 4 weeks before PR update. Traffic kept increasing in all these months

[azn romeo 4u]

Sorry I didn't reply sooner, but I wanted to see what happened after a month. So after I posted this I was at 6.5 Million links. Now I'm at 7.4 million links. I didn't get the two million like in november, almost a million.

So maybe that was a fluke. I got the scared of my life though around Christmas Eve and Christmas. Lost over 30-40% of traffic. And then continued two days, after that.

After looking at my logs, I think mod_security was blocking like a ton of people. After turning it off, traffic seems to be up again. We'll see though. I just switched host also on the 23rd.

If anyone is interested, I can update this thread every month or every few months. Not sure if anyone has done a thread where they get millions of links. I update everyday pretty much also on this particular website. And like I said in my first post I might be an "authoritative" site.

I can make this into a case study, but I'm not really sure what to look for or explain. I was never effected by panda also.

Edit. Also traffic appears to be climbing still *knocks on wood*

[Planet13]

Please do keep us updated. Thanks.

[jqwan]

Yes I am interested in you keeping this updated as well

[Dan01]

I am also interested. 100 million links? Great!

[azn romeo 4u]

Here is my lastest update. After I posted the previous lastest update, where WMT said I had 7.4 million links, 7 days after (Jan 6), it jumped to 9.1 million links. So infact I was still getting probably 2+ million links a month.

I thought that WMT updates periodically but it looks to be random and might on depend on how much links you get. Another 3 weeks (Jan 20) after that update, I logged into WMT tools again and it said 10.2 Million links.

And now 6 days later on Jan 26th, I logged in today it says I have 10.9 Million links.

I managed to lose my #1 position on a very high traffic keyword about last week also. So using my site that builds links very fast, I am targeting that keyword to see what happens.

For 1.5 years, I been targetting long-tail exact match keywords. And had a lot of success. Starting last week, I'm going to try to target the bigger more competitive keywords to see what happens, that are related to my site. I'll keep guys updated.

So to recap this update...

1) Sitting at 10.9 Million links
2) Lost #1 position on top keyword
3) Re-targeting that keyword where as before I was targeting exact/similar keywords.

Also one funny thing to note, this months google update has put one of my social networking site above my site. That site just links to my site. I haven no idea.

[azn romeo 4u]

So here is the latest update, I am sitting at 17,000,000 links. Basically I got around 7,000,000 links in a little over a month.

Last time I posted that I had lost the #1 position on one keyword and I would try to get it back just by using my site. So far, I gotten back to #2 and #4 (when using plurals in the word).

My social network page still sits above my main domain for some reason. Actually I know the reason. It's because of the url. I'm almost positive now, that google has massive favor over urls that contain the keywords. I will continue to try to get that #1 spot back for another month, but after that I will go back to targeting my long tail keywords.

Report on the overall health of the site now...traffic is down, pageviews is down as well. I still think it's because of that #1 position being lost. The site though is still bringing in 5 digit uniques per day. But it's definitely down. I'm not sure if it's because of the new keyword I'm targeting or that I haven't been updating the website regularly. Use to do it daily for 6 months straight prior to the new year.

[Planet13]

So are you REALLY getting those links, or are they phantom links just turning up in google WMT?

And if you are really getting them, how are you getting so many?

[azn romeo 4u]

Do phantom links build up on WMT? I get them like how statcounter.com does. They place a link on the code that they provide, when they let people use their counter. I don't run a counter business, my field is in something else. My product comes with a link back also. Also users can freely choose to remove the link. I also give them two options to choose from. They can use the code with the link, or no link back. It's up to them.

But yea, when you get 5 digits per day, and assuming 25% of my visitors use my code, and they ususually do it site wide, you can a mass a lot of links I guess.

The site is 6 years old, so it's been doing this for a while, but like I said in my first post, the amount of link backs started to increase a ton just a few months ago.

[Planet13]

Ahh... thanks for the explanation.

Do phantom links build up on WMT?

I think a few people have said something like that. I don't want to swear by that though, but I am pretty sure a few people mentioned it on these forums.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I think the extra links were there all along but didn't show up until YOUR site gained enough reputation/trust for them to count. I have a strong feeling that links to your site that have nofollow are given full value if/when your site meets an unspecified threshold of trust. e.g. sites with affiliate programs are moving up the serps despite most incoming links being nofollow(which is ignored).

[azn romeo 4u]

I don't think so. Because like I said I had only 1.3 million links a year ago. I don't think they would hide 15 million links.

All links are dofollow. And none of them are affiliate links. They all link to my homepage or inner pages.

WMT says that, 4,400,000 links are from one social network. That social network though uses subdomains for their users.

Also I think been pretty authoritative for a few years now. For example I could rank top 3 for various long tail keyword variations that deal with any topic almost.

[azn romeo 4u]

Well, here's a new update.

In April I actually lost some links. I believe I lost 2 million links. It was at 17,000,000 links but then when I check WMT it said 15,000,000 links.

I thought this was because of the recent change that they did for the month. The change where they don't count links base on where they are placed.

In May I noticed I lost 500,000 more links. So I thought it seems like my site is gonna get hit hard by that April update from Google.

But I just check it a few days ago, and now I almost have 20,000,000 links. Not sure if the links were hiding or I somehow got 5,000,000 links since I last checked. So maybe that April update doesn't affect my site as I thought.

Edit. Also for this particular site, I have not updated for over 3 months. Not sure if that was a factor of it losing links.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I also think "number" of links is fairly irrelevant today, Google is all about quality. Who knows how many of the reported links are of minimal value. Still, congrats on having them, they can't hurt unless they are from a competitor building nasty linkwheels on your behalf.