First, thanks for taking the time to read this, any help is greatly appreciated. I am the owner of a fairly popular poetry/writing website. There are about 100,000 pages of unique content and I believe this to be the most relavent and advanced website dedicated to poetry (I am a little bias). Here's what's going on: A few months ago we had about 700 backlinks indexed by Google and 3800 indexed by Yahoo. Now we have 61 backlinks showing in Google and 4400 in Yahoo. A few months ago we had 70,000 pages indexed by Google, now about 30,000. The pages indexed by Yahoo have gone up (as they should). A few months ago we had a Google PR of 6. Now we have a PR of 5. I've never spammed or done activity to receive a penality, but I believe I am receiving some huge penalities. Does anyone know if I can check if Google is penalizing me? Any other thoughts? Thanks in advance.
There is nothing to worry about figure of Google backlinks. Check yahoo {or mine backlinkwatch} for backlinks. If you are getting organic traffic from Google then what's wrong? & In recent PR update {Jan 25} lot of sites have been brought 1 level down. Don't worry just focus on building regular quality inbound links.
I never understood this as well. I have always had double the number of pages indexed by yahoo as by google. I also receive a much larger amount of traffic from yahoo as google. I've never checked backlinks, but I bet it's the same situation. What's the deal??
Google isn’t penalizing you they are just reducing the benefits they gave you in the first place through reducing the relevance of some backlinks.
I wish it was that simple, Vigor ("Google isn’t penalizing you they are just reducing the benefits they gave you in the first place through reducing the relevance of some backlinks") but it's not. I had 3 incoming links from PR7 pages and Google did not even accept them as backlinks. I had these for 6 months and they never even showed up. Google is the one who classified them as PR7 but they were not good enough to be a backlink?
As long as your traffic is not going down, I would not worry about backlinks or PR. Traffic is the only thing that counts.
I agree with Mr Hopkins.. A few months ago i was showing 325 backlinks in google, now it's only 25.. but my serps and traffic continue to rise, so that's all i care about..
at least u get more backlinks than me and at least ur indexed lol, my site has only 14 backlinks from google with 0 indexed pages, dropped from 25 backlinks and 0 indexed pages lol, i have almost 5000 backlinks from yahoo and 2000 from msn
google only shows you a random sample of your total links....trust me google knows about your links and counts them....they just don't show when you use the link:yourdomain.com operator
The link: operator is so weird. It only shows me links if I put www. infront of my domain with the operator, otherwise it doesn't show me anything. Anyway my site dropped from page 3 or so for one keyword phrase I've been trying to optimize for these last few months down to somewhere in the 900's...not cool. I guess that means time for a new keyword.
Links don't count at Google (and probably at other search engines) if some of reports are to be believed. The search engines are not there to reward SEOers, but to provide relevant info to searchers. And when SEOers began to create thousands of artificial links, search engines began to devalue links in their algorithms, according to the reports doing the round now. While I have no way of verifying what the search engines do, the argument for devaluing links do seem valid
Yes I saw a sudden decrease in my backlinks and PR from 4 to 3 now for site themarketbuzz.com, which I've had online for over 6 years. The few it shows were from a directory site and from Myspace.com. I also have a new site myspacelogin.us that had no PR and now it's got a 2. This also is because of the Myspace links. It's looking hard at backlinks now to see if they come from "Trusted Sites" as they call it. So looks like Myspace is a trusted site. DMOZ is also as the directory site had gotten it's info from them on the first site. As in all rankings and traffic content is king and if you have it people will naturally link back to your content. This is what the search engins want to see now.
That's a double edged sword as it's obvious to me that the easiest place for users to give you links (normally sites like forums) are also the easiest to spam...
Links = Traffic and SE Ranking, If you had no links linking to your website you would never get any traffic except for the odd type in traffic.