Why my good links disappeared from gWMT?

[KeriMorgret]

Lots of people are reporting this in the forums. Barry Schwartz writes a post about it on Search Engine Roundtable at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-link-count-16315.html.

[AlanMosley]

From what I read here, it seems to be a error, https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/webmaster-tools/_r3YwCyJvB4%5B1-25-true%5D

I have sites that have lost most of their links, but rankings remain the same.

[JFritton]

My corporate site went from 140K+ links on Webmasters tools to 133 overnight.  I lost links from Forbes, Bloomberg, and some universities so they were good links.  It has to be an error.  My brand new site is down from several hundred links to showing no data at all.

I'll wait it out but traffic doesn't seem to be affected one way or the other.

[IOSC]

My site has been affected by this issue (loss of links) as well, with pretty decent hits to rankings and traffic, in particular my main keywords.  Generally speaking how long/what does it take to take reach some consensus as to whether it is an update or a just a temporary hiccup?

[JFritton]

It looks like when this happened back in August of 2011 it took up to two weeks to fix.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-bug-13886.html

I have to imagine that it's just a temporary hiccup because my site lost links from major media institutions like Bloomberg and Forbes.  I can't image those links would have been "devalued".  Give it some time and watch your traffic.  Mine is normal today and I imagine that it would have cratered if all my links had actually disappeared.

Good Luck,

Jason

[IOSC]

Jason,

Thanks for the quick response and informative link.  I hope you are right, it does seem like you are, but we will have to wait and see in the meantime.   And I'll have to just keep on looking for other traffic sources.  Best of luck

[AlanMosley]

Could it be, that's these are the only links that Google actually counts?

[IOSC]

Alan,

My only questions are, (if GWT reports links that "count")

What would account for some sites reporting loss of ranking and other sites reporting no loss of ranking?

If this were simply a cosmetic change within GWT than no one would see change in ranking b/c deleted links didn't count to begin with, right?

Unless Google has changed what links "count".

[AlanMosley]

I was wondering if by error they are only showing the links that count, to be clear.

As for some reporting loss of ranking, this may be coincidental or imaginative.

Just a thought

[IOSC]

It could be...I guess the only way to verify is to wait and see if those links reappear in GWT then measuring traffic/ranking data before and after

[JFritton]

There's an updated response from Googles John Mueller:

"Thanks for the report, Anne (and thanks for escalating, Stevie!). This looks like an issue with how the data is displayed in Webmaster Tools, it shouldn't affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking. I don't have any specifics at the moment, but the team is looking into the details to see what we can do here. Thanks for your patience & sorry for the confusion!"

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-homepage-bug-16322.html

[IOSC]

Jason,

Thanks for the update.

Yeah it seems pretty clear that it's a bug at this point.  Not fun while it lasts though