What Happened to My Links? Backlinks Dropped By Half

[Sally Stitts]

I checked my GSC this morning.
I have had OVER 50,000 incoming links for MONTHS.
This morning, I now have 26,000.
HELLO?
Dropping into the abyss - in EVERY WAY POSSIBLE!

Google has grabbed everything from us.
And now, with all our content, they are done with us.
This is not ending well. It is all but over, except for the continuing shafting.
Traffic is now 1/3 what it was 2 months ago. Woe is me.

The astute will make good coin on the stock price decline.
From here on out, it is all about timing.
I'm leaning toward intermediate-term put/call butterflies. You?
.

[Wilburforce]

I have had OVER 50,000 incoming links for MONTHS.
This morning, I now have 26,000.

I have stopped using it myself, but with the number of reported glitches and outages in GSC (see e.g. [webmasterworld.com ]) my first suspicion is that this has little to do with the actual number of incoming links and more to do with a GSC bug.

I would be inclined just to monitor it for now. Howerver, it might also be worth using a third-party backlink checker just to be sure.

[Robert Charlton]

Google had a lot of "user-facing bugs" during April, involving both indexing and reporting. It's hard to know how widespread their effects were, but I'm suspecting that this might be the root of your problem. You mention such a large number of the links that I'm guessing they were crappy links and not worth watching.

Our most recent thread about the status of the outage has references to earlier reports of the problem. . Essentially, the GSC data console is slowly rebuilding in a number of areas....

Search Console data outage April 9-25
May 1, 2019
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4944230.htm [webmasterworld.com]

I recommend reading to the earlier threads cited if you watch your GSC data and don't know what this has been about.

[Kendo]

Two weeks ago, one of my sites dropped from 8,000 to 7,500 but is now back up to 8,500. Their count fluctuates as they mess with their formulas.

But I also notice that some backlinks that they count have been dead for years. In fact some of them were sites that I managed and they were taken offline completely.

There is no order in their chaos.

[CoffeeOrDeathPlease]

As others have said, GSC can be buggy. Have you confirmed these numbers in a more reliable tool? <snip>

There's an important piece missing here - you don't lose that many links overnight unless they're all from a single domain that you were in the footer or sidebar of on thousands of their pages.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:30 pm (utc) on Oct 3, 2019]
[edit reason] Please read forum Charter, under "Forum Options" dropdown [/edit]

[brighteryeg]

GSC often has bugs. Double check on semrush, ahrefs, moz, or another reliable link tool. Even the free ahrefs free tool will give you total link volume and linking domains.