WMT "Links to your site" only reporting links from my own sites

[EditorialGuy]

Today I looked at "Links to Your Site" in Webmaster Tools for the first time in a week or two, and I noticed that nearly all of the links listed on "Overview / All Domains" are links from our own sites. Other sites that link to ours (both legitimate sites and junk sites) are showing only one or two links.

I assume this is a temporary reporting error, but I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing it.

[bhartzer]

I'm not actually surprised. They only show a random snippet of the links to your site.

I looked at a lot of GWT links today (just now) and they seem to be fine for several sites that I work on.

[lucy24]

I assume this is a temporary reporting error

It appears to happen every time they dust behind the server, because this comes up at WebmasterWorld every few months. Never everyone's sites at once. Check back in a week or so and things should be back to normal.

Each time it happens, I hope it means they've found a way to filter out the garbage links (other people's search results, that kind of thing) but so far no luck :( Everything always comes back.

[bumpski]

My inbound links look normal, at the time of your post, and today June 14th.

Did this correct itself?

[EditorialGuy]

Yes, it's back to normal now.

[bumpski]

It appears to happen every time they dust behind the server, because this comes up at WebmasterWorld every few months. Never everyone's sites at once. Check back in a week or so and things should be back to normal.

Each time it happens, I hope it means they've found a way to filter out the garbage links (other people's search results, that kind of thing) but so far no luck :( Everything always comes back.

Lucy24, I'm curious how long you've noticed this phenomena, perchance does is go back to 2011?

[lucy24]

perchance does i[t] go back to 2011?

Well, 2011 is when I started paying attention to logs, which in turn led to discovering WebmasterWorld, so it's a bit of a tautology for me :) What else happened in 2011?

[bumpski]

What else happened in 2011?

-- Panda --

I had one theory about Panda, that Google finally and successfully devalued many junk links. This would hurt many small sites that do not pursue links at all, simply because after the junk links are devalued they would not have many links left at all. Without many valued inbound links, of course, small sites would sink far in the rankings, which is what appeared to happen.

So I thought these inbound link glitches might be Google accidentally showing only the "valued" links.

Which brings me back to the Ten Things:
[google.com...]

[google.com...]

Democracy on the web works.
Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites ....

Not once they introduced "rel=nofollow"! (Not even before!)

[lucy24]

So I thought these inbound link glitches might be Google accidentally showing only the "valued" links.

Well, that would certainly explain why my listed links periodically drop into the single digits :(

[GreyBeard123]

@ bumpski
I was under the impression that …
Penguin = links
Panda = everything except links

What am I missing?

[EditorialGuy]

So I thought these inbound link glitches might be Google accidentally showing only the "valued" links.

Or maybe it's just a reporting error. After all, there's nothing new about reporting errors in Webmaster Tools.

FWIW, our highest-numbered source of links (a news site with 15,000+ resource links to one of our pages) is now listed again after being missing for a while. It wasn't there a couple of days ago after being listed for several years.

[MarieHaynes]

So I thought these inbound link glitches might be Google accidentally showing only the "valued" links.

When the glitches have happened in the past, I've had huge drops in link numbers on sites that have had zero linkbuilding done. I would be very surprised if your theory was true. Would be nice though!