I launched a new site (new domain) last month and I had over 1100 links (site:domain.com) in google but yesterday it came down to 335. I'm using meta tags, i have started some backlinks, i have sitemap setup. But i don't understand why would 700 links disappear all of a sudden? Anyone know whats going on here?
Recommend working on how to encourage googlebot to index these page again. 1. In Webmaster Tools, use Fetch As Googlebot to check that it is accessible to google. 2. When you get confirmation that it can crawl it and you can see that the correct content is being found, click the button/link for that URL to be recrawled and added to the index. 3. On your own site, make sure that there is a good, clear, text-based link to it from the home page or other suitable page. You want to make sure that it is not accidentally "orphaned" and the home page is recrawled most often. In addition, check that there is nothing on that page which would be seen negatively by search engines (eg hidden text, spam, linking to bad neighborhoods, etc).
Maybe there are some duplicate pages like tags, categories, archive, etc. that made the index pages count so high
I also had fallen into a similar situation. And I continue to generate backlink after a time everything was normal
May be those links were coming from similar website and they deleted those articles or may be because of variations in the tool you use to check backlinks. The only thing you can do to re-gain your ranking is to just keep building quality links instead of quantity and continue to add fresh but unique content. If you have any duplicate content on website then remove that immediately.
That is a lot of links to build to a new website that fast. Google probably did a review of what you are doing and where your links are coming from. I would imagine if you built 1100 links in 1 month you used some software for that which probably blasted 1000 links in a short time to your website causing red flags to go up with Google. I would also guess that the 1100 links are from forums, profile links and social bookmarking with very similar anchor text which Google can easily trace. They simply found these links worthless and deleted them from their index and your site fell in went into the sandbox. The only way out now is to build consistent quality backlinks to your site and stick with it for a while and you will eventually get out of the sandbox in a month or two. Take it as a lesson learned on building too many low quality links too fast to a new site.
If you can provide the URL of your new site it will be helpful to review otherwise i have to assume and below mentioned situations are the appropriate reason for your situation. If you use site:domain.com (without space between colon and domain name) it should show only your indexed page i.e. your own website page and if you use site: domain.com (space between colon and domain name) it will show your backlinks along with your indexed page. These can drastically change the link count, so check if you have entered correct query, maybe site: domain.com showed you 1100 links and site:domain.com showed you 335. If you still think site:domain.com showed the 1100 links not the site: domain.com then you have following issue. 1) canonicalization issue. There will be both versions of indexed page of your site i.e. www.domain.com and domain.com pages indexed in search engine. 2)URL name change/Page name change. You might have optimized your site pages for keywords after the site is indexed by Google, so what happens here is you have both the old page name/url name and new page name/url name indexed in search engine. I would advice you to first check all the indexed page and the URL which is indexed then solve the canonicalization issue if you have any after which you have to use Google Webmaster tool to remove the old URLs you don't want Google to index. Don't worry this is not going to affect your site. I hope this helps.
It happens... Google never shows your actual backlink count. Otherwise your competitors will easily track your footprints and may harm your strategy. Google does this intentionally.
thanks gautam. I used the site:domain.com and i happen to get different results at different times of the day. I have tried it a few times in the past 2 days and it fluctuates. I also saw a difference when i searched domain.com (not site:domain.com) on google.ca and then google.com. google.ca gave me 1900 and google.com gave me 4000 results. Anyways it seems like my index pages have went back up to 1040 from 335. I did some keyboard change on the index page of my wiki and that could have impacted it.
two possibilities..may be your sites appear with better ranking after few days or your site will be considerd as spam in search engine..