Could be a number of reasons, are the links still there? were they paid links cut out of the index? Is your site brand new and you built links too fast?
Site is one year old. The links grow gradually and I had about 130 backlinks in Googel one month ago. Now I have only 63. To be truth I have not been linking for last three month. May be one link per two days.
Google are more restrict regarding on the quality of backlinks if before the most important is the quantity but as Google wanted to give more relevant results that why the quality of backlinks are at most.
Roksalana ...Are you mentioning the number of back links you see on your Google webmasters tool console or the one you found it on the browser using link:yoursite ? Google won't show all your back links in the browser. You can find all your actual back links in your webmasters tool. The number of back links shown in the browser has dropped in numbers for my sites too... after the last Google PR update, but the actual backlinks which I see in my webmasters tool is stable. If this is the case you don't have to be concerned about it. Just check it out
There are some Google updates going on so that's pretty normal. Wait for a week or so and check again. I gained some links actually
What is too fast? can anyone tell me what is the best rate of link building? how many per day/week/month? Thanks in advance
I have almost the exact number of back links using link: and using webmaster tool for one of our sites. But not even close on the another one of our sites 100:10000 not even close at all. Thats why I use back link checkers, webconfs and seobook tools as a cross reference.
Mine also went down very recently , and I investigated and found out some of the links I set up had been taken down. You may want to briefly run thru all the links you expected to be there and see if any got taken down.
It's nothing to worry about. I just checked my Google links with the link: command. And yes, they recently went down by more than half. But Google's Webmaster Tools still shows the same, existing, much higher number of links that Google actually knows about. I would recommend ignoring the link: command. It gives you a meaningless number of no use to you.
The link: command is hardly showing any inbounds for my sites at the moment. They are still increasing in webmaster tools however.
How can I check backlinks at webmaster tools? It uses the same link:mysite.com command. There is other "mysite.com" commad and it shows 8000 backlinks
Use the info presented by Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html I noted an increase of the backlinks of my both sites at Google Webmaster Tools, but a drastic decrease at the Google Toolbar.