WMT / OSE showing 610,000 links that don't exist

[RobPell]

This post is deleted!

[Cornel_Ilea]

Hi Rob,

OSE Shows just 1352 links to www.digitalTVselector.com. ... ???

One question: Have these links ever been on boardstylist.com in he past?

Have you tried this? http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/www.boardstylist.com

Cornel

[RobPell]

Hi Cornel, thanks for the response.

I should have been more clear. WMT shows 610,000 links from boardstylist.com, but OSE shows only a few. But I think its part of teh same problem as I can't find any.

Yes there used to be links in the footer, now apparently removed.

http://web.archive.org/web/20110208053818/http://boardstylist.com/

You'll notice that OSE says there is a link here:

http://boardstylist.com/snowboard-sales-4/2012/01/

but there isn't. What are the bots seeing that I'm not?

Its a strange one...

[EGOL]

Possible causes and solutions.

-- google sees canonical and session IDs in URLs and that inflates number of linking pages

-- download the site onto your computer and search it for boardstylist.com .  Easy way to find links

-- or, download the database and search

-- use xenu linksleuth to find outbound links

-- drill down to the links in webmaster tools

One of these should be worth a biscuit

[ShaMenz]

Hey Rob,

While I confess that cookies (or biscuits) ROCK my world, I think the reward might be a little the worse for wear by the time it finds me here on Kangaroo Island, but I think the explanation AND the solution is fairly simple. It can be fairly well explained by 3 facts:

1. As you mentioned, the links were previously in existence on the site ... when I checked the source on the page you supplied via Wayback Machine (I love that thing!!), I found that there were actually 8 different links on the page.
2. We know that the most recent update of Mozscape (underlying OSE results), while recently released will contained data which is from crawls anywhere between February & April as explained in this post from Rand about a week ago. So links removed recently may still be seen in OSE.
3. Google WMT is notorious for failing to update link information, 404 errors etc. I have had experience of one site which still showed warnings in WMT almost a year after they were fixed. It happens time and time again, site after site. So once again the data in WMT is quite likely from crawls that occurred when the links were there & the warnings are out of date.

The obvious Solution would be to lodge a Reconsideration Request with Google ASAP and see if you can't alert them to the fact that a lot of remediation work has been done.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[RobPell]

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I have actually tried all of these suggestions, but great minds think alike Definitely worth a biscuit.

Wouldn't social media be so much more engaging if instead of getting a thumbs up, you got a cookie in the post. It's the next big social network. Nobody steal my idea!

[RobPell]

Hi Sha,

Thanks so much for the reply. Yes, I think you may have identified the issue. I'm not sure it can be anything else. There was a site revamp in Feb apparently, so I guess linkscape / WMT are just much slower than I expected.

I'd expect the algo is more up to date than this, so perhaps linking this to the Penguin smack down is a bit of a red herring. We've got a bit more tidying to do then we'll submit a re-inclusion request.

And Kangaroo Island? Very jealous. Had a great couple of months there a few years ago. Sun, sand, friendly people... I am currently watching diggers build yet another office block on a very wet and cold day in London... I think you win.

[EGOL]

Wouldn't social media be so much more engaging if instead of getting a thumbs up, you got a cookie in the post.

ha ha... you should start a site like that... I think that it would be kickass.