Google Link Meltdown!

[HardlyNoticable]

I'm sure all of you have used the "link:mysite.com" google search to see what and how many sites are linking to "mysite.com".

Well, we have several sites that have just suddenly had their lists get DRASTICALLY reduced. For instance, one of our sites, which had more than a thousand sites linking to it now has only 64.

None of our links were from link farms or anything that would be considered link spam. We have never employed such tactics.

Fortunately, we've also seen similar things happen to websites that we consider competitors and we had some idea of what their numbers were also.

Does anyone know what happened? I've been wondering if it's just some kind of reindexing or temporary glitch. Has anyone seen this happen before?

HardlyNoticable.

[Ryan L]

are your links actually gone...physically?

I have seen lots of discussion regarding the quantity of links showing in google using the link: operator, the visible page rank and the total index results shrinking.


I think that if your playing buy the rules...its all still there, google just doesn't want to show it to you.

IMHO its all about removing the tools that are used to value paid links.

Have your SERPs or traffic dropped dramatically?

[HardlyNoticable]

Just to be clear here... I'm talking about links TO our site, not ON our site.

I can't believe that nearly a thousand links to my example site just suddenly went bad. And our other sites, AND our competitor sites.

I checked the example site and one other site a few weeks ago. One week ago I checked it again and that's when I noticed the drastic decrease in links to the site. The OTHER site that I checked at the same time had about 50 sites linking to it... now Google says there are none. Neither site had anything to do with each other other than that we were the agency for both.

[Marcia]

Google just shows a small random sampling of the links to a site, and it's been this way for a long time.

[HardlyNoticable]

Google just shows a small random sampling of the links to a site, and it's been this way for a long time.

Thanks for the response, but I still don't understand.

For over a year now, every time I've queried Google regarding these external links to client websites, I've gotten substantially larger and CONSISTENT numbers. There are some clients sites that are not showing any results AT ALL anymore. I can't tell you that the old numbers were complete - how could I... but it certainly looked that way to me. And I can tell you that it was that way until only a few weeks ago at the most. Something has changed very recently - either in Google's database or in the results from the link: search term prefix.

I would really like to hear from anyone else who has seen the same thing that I'm seeing.

[Marcia]

They're also showing a much smaller set of results for a site: search just recently, so some things have definitely changed.

[HardlyNoticable]

Do you know where I might get information regarding the change? I would like to reassure my boss/customer that it's not an issue.

[Ryan L]

look around its basically the only thing any ones been talking about lately.

I know Andy Beard has a thread/post, its all over Sphinn and nearly every other SEO forum.

The key is the phrase "Showing" when you go to check were your links were actually located, are they there or aren't they?

I suspect that you'll only have issues if you bought links, because the big G has taken a hard stance on paid links. Many sites are dropping them because they don't want to play chicken with google.

Do you know where I might get information regarding the change? I would like to reassure my boss/customer that it's not an issue.

-in your in house analytics account. Has your traffic actually dropped? is your Revenue down? Where do you stand in the serps?