How long for Google Webmaster tools to update/reflect link changes

[righty]

Hi all,

Does anyone know or have experience of how long GWMT takes to update its data?, we did some work on our link profile back in October/November but are still seeing old links (removed) showing in GWMT.

Thanks in advance,

[Alex-Harford]

It can depend on numerous factors - does the site have lots of pages or not many? Does it have many backlinks? Is it updated often? Does it have content worth crawling (i.e. not 'thin')? If these other sites that were linking to you don't have many pages, don't have many backlinks, are not updated more often and/or have poor content, Google might not have crawled them to see the link has been removed yet.

I am assuming you're talking about backlinks though, and not errors within your own site, but the same still applies. If you are talking internally, have you looked at Health > Crawl Stats? You can see how many pages Google crawls on your site per day, so if you know roughly how many pages you have it might give you an idea. Also if you mean internal links, have you marked them as fixed?

I have seen sites that have an average crawl rate of around 10000 pages per day take a while (a few weeks) for WMT to update, but then again - there is more to crawl so more to be missed!

[righty]

Thanks Alex, yes was talking about "backlinks", just seems odd as we work through our backlink profile we are still seeing links we have removed, I can understand a delay in weeks, perhaps a month but 2/3 months, just wondered what others had experienced.

Thanks,