Just noticed something weird... When browsing SERPs I usually right-click results and check the number of links coming in... Not today! Check this: http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=football+memorabilia (got there via Toolbar set to UK searches) Hover over the links and check your status bar... It's now a re-direct type of link and right-click > Backward Links doesn't work anymore because the redirect doesn't have any IBL's. Strange!
Yeah I saw that a few months ago, then it went back to normal. Now its back to the redirect again. I'm not sure why, but I don't really care for it. I just discovered that right click/backward link thing a few weeks ago too
Good (well...) at least it confirms I'm not going mad... Looking at the redirect string: [nourl]http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://sports-memorabilia.ebay.co.uk/&e=747[/nourl] It seems to record the position/rank of the result. Perhaps they do a couple-of-days test on traffic vs. ranking.
they just added start=1 recently then; the link used to look like this: (i posted this on seochat amonth ago or so when I noticed it for the first time) [nourl]http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=U&q=http://sports-memorabilia.ebay.co.uk/&e=747[/nourl] Interesting.
Can yuo have a look in your browser and see what the e value equates to? Mine all say e=747 regardless of whether it's a toolbar search or a normal text box - button search in IE. Looking in FireFox, the status bar suggests a direct link but right-clicking and using the Gbar again to check backlinks i get this: Your search - link:http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=football memorabilia - did not match any documents. So it's atill not a direct link it seems. But the raw HTML code is a plain link... So then it would suggest a FireFox GoogleBar anomaly. Hmmm need to do some more checking...
Checked and it seems to be working normal now. At least here. Here is what I get from the page url: http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=football+memorabilia The backlinks to teh listed sites seems to be working also. Here is what I get for BL's for the #1 site: http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=football+memorabilia which shows 36 inbound links.
Google is ne'er broken, only google adwords/adsense and gmail ------- Advertising and Marketing, Import-Export Advice, Translation Agency, UK Search Engine, Yellow Pages