Google lost 9,000 inbound links
-
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?
-
That helps lots, Matt. Thanks for being on the ball. I'll sleep better tonight.
Cheers.
-
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."
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!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Docs
Hi Mozers, I was wondering what do you guys think about indexing Google Docs files as Documents or Spreadsheets? Can you do that and is it any help if you what to get some content on the firs page of Google. And also can Google see that content and links, because when I deactivate the javascript on chrome I couldn't see anything from the content Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VeeamSoftware0 -
Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages
Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
New Website Look/Structure - Should I Redirect or Update Pages w/ Quality Inbound Links
This questing is regarding an ecommerce website that I hand wrote(html) in 1997. One of the first click and buy websites, with cart/admin system that I also developed. After all this time, the Old plain HTML look just doesnt cut it. I just updated to XHTML w/ a very modern look, and believe the structured data will index better. All products and current category pages will have the identical vrls taken from the old version. I decided to go with the switch after manual penalty, which has since been removed... I figured now is the time to update. My big question is that over the years, a lot of my backlinks came from products/news that are either no longer relevant or just not available. The pages do exist, but can only be found from the Outbound Link Source. For SEO purposes, I have thought a few things I can do but can't decide which one is the best choice. Any Insight or suggestions would be Awesome! 1. Redirect the old link to the most relevant page in my current catalog. 2. Add my new header/footer to old page(this will add a navigation bar w/ brands/cats/etc) 3. Simply add a nice new image to the top of these pages linking home & update any broken/irrelevant links. I was also considering adding just the very top 2 inches of my header(logo,search box, phone, address) *note, some of these pages do receive some traffic. Nothing huge, but consider the 50+ pages, it ads up.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Blocked from google
Hi, i used to get a lot of trafic from google but sudantly there was a problem with the website and it seams to be blocked. We are also in the middle of changing the root domain because we are making a new webpage, i have looked at the webmaster tools and corrected al the errors but the page is still not visible in google. I have also orderd a new crawl. Anyone have any trics? do i loose a lot when i move the domainname, or is this a good thing in this mater? The old one is smakenavitalia.no The new one is Marthecarrara.no Best regards Svein Økland
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sveinokl0 -
We are ignored by Google - what should we do?
Hi, We believe that our website - https://en.greatfire.org - is being all but ignored by Google Search. The following two examples illustrate our case. 1. Searching for “China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve”. This is the title of a blog post that we wrote which received some 50,000 visits. On Yahoo and Bing search, we rank first for this search. On Google, however, we rank 7th. Each of the six pages ranking higher than us are quoting and linking to our story. 2. Searching for “Online Censorship In China”. This is the title of our front page. Yahoo and Bing both rank us third for this search. On Google, however, we are not even among the first 300 results. Two of the pages among the first 10 results link to us. Our website has an average of around 1000 visits per day. We are quoted in and linked from virtually all Western mainstream media (see https://en.greatfire.org/press). Yet to this day we are receiving almost no traffic from Google Search. Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. If people could find us in Google, it would greatly help to spread awareness of the extent of Internet restrictions here. If you could indicate to us what the cause of our poor rankings could be, we would be very grateful. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org0 -
Any good link buying companies ( http://www.text-link-ads.com )
Hi guys I have been passed this website: http://www.text-link-ads.com Has anyone ever used text-links ads before?? Can anyone please show me the way and suggest any really good lin buying companies? I am really fiding it hard to find good places to place inbound links into our website.. Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Link Request Email on Site`s Link Pages
Hello I have assembled a list of web-sites that have "Links" section that has a list of persons` favorite tools. Those pages have a link to my competitor. I know my tool is just as good if not better and want to request a link. I`m thinking of sending an email asking for a link and offering a small amount of money for it. Questions: A) How much should I offer? Should I offer anything at all B) Is there an email style that someone can suggest that has been tested and proven to work for this type of situtation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellopotap0 -
Random Google?
In 2008 we performed an experiment which showed some seemingly random behaviour by Google (indexation, caching, pagerank distributiuon). Today I put the results together and analysed the data we had and got some strange results which hint at a possibility that Google purposely throws in a normal behaviour deviation here and there. Do you think Google randomises its algorithm to prevent reverse engineering and enable chance discoveries or is it all a big load balancing act which produces quasi-random behaviour?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan-Petrovic0