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If it helps, my links are showing up again on GWMT as of mid morning.  Looks like the fix is in place.

Hi Karl,

Check out this thread here to start with.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-my-good-links-disappeared-from-gwmt

It appears that GWT is having an issue currently with reporting all links going to the homepage of your site.  According to Google it shouldn't be affecting your rankings or traffic, just the reporting - but they are checking into it.

That might be a good part of your issue.

There's an updated response from Googles John Mueller:

"Thanks for the report, Anne (and thanks for escalating, Stevie!). This looks like an issue with how the data is displayed in Webmaster Tools, it shouldn't affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking. I don't have any specifics at the moment, but the team is looking into the details to see what we can do here. Thanks for your patience & sorry for the confusion!"

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-homepage-bug-16322.html

It looks like when this happened back in August of 2011 it took up to two weeks to fix.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-bug-13886.html

I have to imagine that it's just a temporary hiccup because my site lost links from major media institutions like Bloomberg and Forbes.  I can't image those links would have been "devalued".  Give it some time and watch your traffic.  Mine is normal today and I imagine that it would have cratered if all my links had actually disappeared.

Good Luck,

Jason

My corporate site went from 140K+ links on Webmasters tools to 133 overnight.  I lost links from Forbes, Bloomberg, and some universities so they were good links.  It has to be an error.  My brand new site is down from several hundred links to showing no data at all.

I'll wait it out but traffic doesn't seem to be affected one way or the other.

It's probably just an issue of time with Google.  Depending on your site it can take a while to get re-crawled and have the new changes indexed.

Best,

Jason

I don't understand how it would interfere with on-site SEO.  We use the Quantcast scripts and haven't seen any issues with it.  Our rankings have been increasing steadily and we haven't received any notifications of crawler errors.

Quantcast is generally pretty on-the-ball with things like this and I think if Google had issues with their script then they would fix it fast.

Best,

Jason

Keep in mind that Mozscape only updates once every 30 days or so.  If you just put out the link you won't see it on OSE for a  while.  http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape%20Schedule

However, I can see the link redirection and I'm not certain that you'll get the most benefit from that.  Perhaps someone can answer that a bit more competently than I can.

Also, press release sites are passing very little value these days so I wouldn't get your hopes up overall.

Best,

Jason

Hmm.. Perhaps their main links were still included?  Mine dropped right along with my competitors.

Have you noticed link volume loss in other tools?

It was most likely due to the smaller size of the mozscape update http://www.seomoz.org/blog/july-mozscape-update

Basically this months update was smaller than ones in the past, so links (and their metrics) that may have been included in the past might not be showing now because the update indexed less overall.

Check out your stats compared to your competitors and you may see that everyone has dropped by a fairly comparable amount.

Hi Jennifer,

I know I might catch some flak for even talking about this, but I have to keep a close watch on our competitors because they are constantly rocketing up in the SERPs from paid/spam links.  For some reason it seems to take Google a while to catch them even with the new Penguin update.

I have no problems with using tricks of the trade to get advantageous results in rankings, but it irritates me to get outranked by competitors who are blatantly just buying thousands of junk links.

In each situation I use OSE to get several examples and then use:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport  to report them.  It seems to take a week or so but each time I've reported I've seen the spammers URL tank about 50 positions.

In many situations however Google will just remove value from the junk links without penalty and you can still lose your position to the competitor if overall they have more good links than you do.  Also take into consideration your onsite SEO, content quality and social signals.

Best of luck,

Jason

Hello JBGlobalSEO,

I'm having the same issue.  I run digital marketing for a company that has over 200 stores nationwide and now, apparently, over 200 Google+ pages.

From what I've been able to find out, each of these local Google+ pages are currently able to be managed through their associated Google Places accounts.  Google has said that they are looking to include the functionality of being able to handle multiple locations through one Google+ account, but they haven't mentioned exactly how they are going to accomplish this yet and there's no expected timeline yet.

It's going to be extremely important however, since the new Google Places/Google + pages will be indexable.  I'm already building a procedure for our local store leaders to regularly contribute content for their individual location while I manage it centrally and it's going to have to be updated on a regular basis.

I know this isn't much of an answer, but I wanted to confirm that so far there's little to no information out there on handling multiple locations through a single Gplus page, however Google has stated that they intend to provide that functionality "soon".

Thanks,

Jason

I don't understand how it would interfere with on-site SEO.  We use the Quantcast scripts and haven't seen any issues with it.  Our rankings have been increasing steadily and we haven't received any notifications of crawler errors.

Quantcast is generally pretty on-the-ball with things like this and I think if Google had issues with their script then they would fix it fast.

Best,

Jason

It was most likely due to the smaller size of the mozscape update http://www.seomoz.org/blog/july-mozscape-update

Basically this months update was smaller than ones in the past, so links (and their metrics) that may have been included in the past might not be showing now because the update indexed less overall.

Check out your stats compared to your competitors and you may see that everyone has dropped by a fairly comparable amount.

Consider using mechanical turk to crowd source writing new product descriptions if you have a lot of them.

I've never found any spinning software that works anywhere near well enough that I would want to show the results to customers and it can even hurt you with the search engines.

Keep in mind however that links and rankings can degrade over time.  If you aren't building new content on the new domain then the advantage may begin to fade after a while.  It can be difficult to develop unique, fresh content for both domains.

It depends on how close your branding of each will be and if it's meant to drive sales leads then you also have to make sure to focus on the user experience for both.

-Jason

I agree with Justin. "Defensive" use of multiple domains to pick up misspellings or misremembered names can be valid strategy, but I would 301 them to the main site.

Trying to build links, social signals and unique, fresh content for each individual domain for SEO purposes probably isn't a good idea.

Hmm.. Perhaps their main links were still included?  Mine dropped right along with my competitors.

Have you noticed link volume loss in other tools?

This is a pretty stupid question sorry, but hopefully it is easy to resolve:

Both OSE and Woorank list our site as having 17 Facebook likes.

The Facebook icon on the page shows 92 likes.

Our Facebook Page shows 560 likes.

Where is the 17 number coming from??

our page is: http://www.GoldMaxUSA.com/

Thanks,

Jason

It's probably just an issue of time with Google.  Depending on your site it can take a while to get re-crawled and have the new changes indexed.

Best,

Jason