Question regarding fall in number of backlinks

I am seeing the exact same thing for an assortment of sites. I cannot explain it. It may be just an update issue and hopefully will correct itself. Otherwise we are all going to have to roll up our sleeves (I kid.....) and get to work.

 

I see the same thing. The number of backlinks have increased as far as I know but according to Google we lost about 20%. Maybe Google implemented some new requirement for what is counted as valid backlinks?

 

I too was affected. Backlinks dropped big time.

 

I too lost 50 links to one of my sites!

Many folks have also reported a drop in their PR ratings. If some pages with links to our sites, dropped in PR to below PR4, that could account for them no longer being reported with a link:www.domain.com search.

Maybe the "sandbox" effect on links (i.e. age of the links) is playing a more expansive role now that Google was obviously playing around with their Algo prior to the update!

example: A PR7 link may know take 3-4 months (or more) to fully express itself (read pass on it's maximum PR value).

So a PR7 link would still count as a link but maybe only a link with a value of a PR2 or PR3. Over time, that link will slowly mature.

If this is the case, the site it originally pointed to would see the effect of "losing" that PR7 link without actually losing the link at all.

...Just speculating here...

Caryl

 

Some ot the site I monitor were up and others down dramatically.

I've seen the suggestion on other forums that what Google is doing now can only be considered as presenting a "sample" of the backlinks. How they decide what to include in the sample is anybody's guess.

The best tool for reporting links that I've seen lately is this link popularity tester. As you will see when you use it Yahoo seems to be the most accurate reporter of actual numbers of link to a page.

 

Same here. The irony was that it was supposed to be ALLOT more almost double. At least my PR went up to 6

 

Bob,

I ran www.mcdar.com/camping1/sleeping-bags.htm thru that tool and Yahoo reports NO links to that page. Google reports 170 links to that page.

I think Yahoo is very slow to update links plus they seem to report dead links for ages.

Here is a Link Popularity Tool that also includes HotBot.

In fact if you go to www.mcdar.net you can access all of our tools from the menu.

Caryl

 

Weried.. all of my sites have went up, some from PR4 to PR5, some from PR1 to PR5.

 

I've just noticed some of my sites returning old Backlink results (same as before the recent update.)

 

Still reports a PR3 link to one of our sites. Yet total links dropped from >100 back to 14. Most of them used to be internal. Those internal ones now cut down to just 3. Even PR 0 page link from this forum shows so to me it doesn't seem like they changed the PR factor in the equation.

 

I didn't realize you had a linK popularity tester.

I also tried the sleeping bags site and got that funny result, but for everything else I tested Yahoo was very current. Try this domain for instance www.123securityproducts.com.

Or even www.online-poker-rooms.nu which is only 10 days old.

I wonder if the test is not working for inner pages. All the others I've tested have been home pages.

 

Caryl,

Try this. Use your tool to do popularity searches on these three URLs:

infopool.compar.com -- this is simply a redirect to the following two real URLs
www.compar.com/infopool
www.compar.com/infopool/index.html

Yahoo reports 288 links for the first URL and 0 for the last two???????

 

Bob,
I have just finished updating the Keyword Analysis Tool to report Yahoo Backlinks in the last column rather than @www.domain.com.

While working on this I discovered that Yahoo reports ALL Links pointing to ALL pages within a domain.

So a search on Yahoo for linkdomain:www.mcdar.com also includes the links that are pointing to www.mcdar.com/camping1/sleeping-bags.htm

That is probably why their numbers look so inflated!

 

ALSO,

Has anyone tried the "link:www.domain.com" comand in the website formerly know as Proogle?

It will return the links pointing to your site WITH the PR value of the link page!


here is the link...
BTW they now refer to it as Prog

I see a lot of forum links now showing in my backlinks. The odd thing is, the forum links are ALL PR0

enjoy...

 

I was checking out a theory that Google is no longer paying much attention to pages named "links.____" that are anchored with the word "Links" - so I searched Google for "links.html", found a nice PR6 page titled "links.html" and anchored with the text "Links".

Here's the PR6 page - http://www.fftw.org/links.html
Here's one site from the PR6 "links.html" page I checked (it had only 9 backlinks so it wasn't too hard to search through ) - http://www.jjj.de/fft/fftpage.html

There's no sign of the backlink from http://www.fftw.org/links.html - nada.

The www.fftw.org page uses that anchor text "Links" and the links page is named "links.html" - and it doesn't seem to appear on the pages it links to as a backlink.

I wonder if that's why so many folks saw such a drop in the total number of backlinks? Check through your backlinks, see if anyone can find pages named "links.___" - then see if they are anchored by the text "Links". Maybe I'm nuts, but it seem Google is not listing them.

TimS

 

Let's here em'! How many backlinks did you lose? I went from 250 to 0 in Google for one of my sites. That is unreal? Yet, my PR went up?

 

went up from 51 to 65 - lots missing thou - PR stable at 5

 

My number of links went up - but much less than expected. And there are no listings coming from pages named "link.htm" or "links.htm" at all.