My site's been slowly growing link backs and had 4,500 a couple weeks ago. I login to webmaster tools today and now it says I have 175,000 links to my site. What the hell? I know I didn't build THAT many links. Has Google lost their mind? Jesus.
Google Says New Links In Webmaster Tools Are Correct & Will Grow Search Engine Roundtable July 1, 2010
The site in particular is the one piece site in my sig. My other health site shot from 200 links to 2,700. The PR for all my sites haven't changed yet. Lazy Google.
I'm referring to how they report their back links. It's been buggy for quite for a while, and they finally update it after all this time. I don't think the PR update will happen until July 4th or so.
No, it wasn't buggy. It was intentionally crippled to make it pretty much useless. Now for some reason they've decided to actually report links again. The puzzle is why they would do that.
Either way, it's buggy no matter the cause. Even with caffeine, 175k links? It does bring up a bigger question, what's the difference and what are we gaining by even bothering to check how many links go to our sites? To me, I watch the SERPS but given the clear difficulties in counting links that every search engine experiences, I don't find link counts to be useful.
Why do you assume that Google (or Bing, or whoever) can't accurately count those links? That's a bad assumption, IMO. On the other hand, I agree: Checking backlinks isn't very useful. Neither is getting excited about Toolbar PageRank. The only thing that matters is (a) SE ranking and (b) traffic.
Yeah, it's hard to count on the statistics given about link counts. It might be best to just concentrate on the SERPS.
You might imagine that would be a bad assumption, care to provide any proof that these search engines actually count anything other then Sig links correctly? For my wine site, we've created over 15k total links by our own records (which aren't completely accurate by any means) YSE shows about 8k one day and 12k the next month. Frankly, I'm surprised to hear someone with so many posts here at DP implying that the search engines not only accurately count links, but that they accurately display them. Again, my main point: WHO CARES? Total #'s of links don't matter, traffic and SERPS do matter though.
I was checking through the backlinks and they seem legit. Take note that webmaster tools is also including nofollow backlinks as well. I find this interesting.
Where we should to trust ? In the Webmaster Tools of Google or some backlinks checker tools in internet ?
Hah I noticed this the other day - we went from a few thousand backlinks to a few million backlinks on our flagship site. I'm glad I checked this thread, I thought Google was having issues.
I partly agree. I don't give a ****... well...don't want use a bad language here... LOL...I don't give much on Toolbar PR. But... Q:How do you increase SE ranking and by doing that also traffic? A:With more backlinks! So backlink counting does matter to me for sure and I'm glad Google finally will show a more accurate number of backlinks in their Webmaster tools. To me it was sometimes frustrating, knowing we build backlinks ona daily basis and the number of links listed in Webmaster Tools didn't increase for weeks or even went down sometimes. So I had to use yahoo site explorer to get a little bit of success feeling and excitement again. I noticed they also show some nofollows which I was aware of since I'm trying to build links in a natural looking way but still I just wished they also would show for all listed links if it's a follow or nofollow backlink since I noticed a lot of my links turned basically overnight from once follow to later nofollow or I lost them due to the fact some blog admins just disabled all links in general from comments in older posts. Anyway, thanks for sharing the news about Google. verdecove
I check most of my backlinks with YSE because google has a tendency to pick only the very few links they like.. still nice to see they are counting more backlinks for now...
Looks like the count went up again to 231,000 from 174,000. It's now showing links I've built within the last month. I'm wondering how this is going to affect the site's PR / SE rankings in the upcoming update. I'll let you all know.