All my backlinks suddenly vanished.

[Horton]

Hi everyone, first post. I have a site that had thousands of backlinks a few days ago in Google, but now there are none appearing, and also no pages similar to mine.

Google still ranks my homepage PR6, and a couple of my internal pages are also PR6 although some have dropped to a PR4.

My search engine position however remains very strong for many keyword combinations. This site is a very popular wedding planning directory

Yahoo still shows my site with 11,000 backlinks.

My question is should I contact Google with this, or do you think this problem will rectify itself soon. I usually do not micromanage my Google Search Results, but am panicked now that all of our links disappeared. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[cariboo]

I've heard about several similar cases.

If I were you, unless you see drastic changes in rankings for your pages, I won't bother at all about this alleged lack of backlinks...

Google never showed the actual list of backlinks with the command link:

So you can suppose you still have the same backlinks as usual.

By the way, they changed their manner of selecting links to show a few days ago. The result are more backlinks showed for some sites, and less for others...

But nothing to worry about. :)

[Marcia]

Ditto, nothing to worry about. Mine got virtually wiped out with little left but links from spammy pages I had no idea about. It hasn't affected a thing.

One message I got from it was that if garbage links put up by other people could hurt is, it certainly would have harmed me - and it hasn't at all. There's kind of a comfort in that.

[paulhiles]

Google certainly does seem to have changed its selection process for a site's backinks. A number of theories have popped up in various SEO forums "oh they wouldn't show any site less than a PR4"... or speculation that Google has finally figured out a mechanism for detecting link farms.

I honestly don't know what to believe really, but I'm encouraged to see my backlinks count rising slowly but surely, whilst 2-3 of my competitor's backlinks have been decimated! :)

[Horton]

It is all very confusing...My site also used to have a recent date next to it for when it was last visited by Google, and now that date also does not appear and all the links seem to have vanished.

I started using a new webstatistics program Livestats.net which puts a small image on my site, could that affect Google's ability to access my links?

[Joseph Morin]

Most web analytics programs place a small 1x1 pixel in order to track activity. There hasn't been a problem with that and most major ecommerce sites (enterprise level) use this type of tracking code.