Google lost 9,000 inbound links

[DarrenX]

I logged into GWT today.  It typically reports that our page has about 9,000 inbound links, but today it said we have 225.   There are no warnings or messages about any manual action. In fact, this site has never received any penalties or warnings.

Since November I have used the disavow tool to remove porn links that a competitor has pointed at my site.  Typically I go through Google's "new" links list and add any of the obviously bad links to the disavow list.  That effort seemed to be going ok, and my site does not seem to be penalized for this negative seo.

The 225 links that remain are scattered back through 2010.  This site has been online since 2005 and has accumulated lots of links over the years. Some great, some not so great.

Queries are down about 1500 per day since last week, about a 15% drop.  There is a slight drop in some keyword rankings, but nothing huge, and most of the SERPS I track do not seem to be impacted.  The PR is steady at 4, where it's been for years.

So... what do you think I should do?  Just watch it for a week and see if they come back?   Try removing the "disavow" list just in case it some how messed things up (looks ok on the surface to me).

Has this ever happened to anyone else?

[MattAntonino]

It's a display bug.

"We are aware of this issue and are looking into it; you do not need to take any action. We hope to have the normal data shown again in the near future. The data shown there is informational and does not affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking."

Google commented on it here.

Search Engine Land had a post about it as well - same answer.  It's a display bug, it's not affecting anything.

Hope that helps!

[DarrenX]

That helps lots, Matt. Thanks for being on the ball.  I'll sleep better tonight.

Cheers.