Google Search Console has a link report and that link report has become less and less useful over the years. This morning, it seems like Google pushed an update or has a bug where people now see about half the number of links they saw the previous day.
In some cases, SEOs see zero to just a handful of reported links.
There are complaints about this in the comments section here and also on Twitter.
While I see many links being reported on this site, it is still about half of what was reported a year ago. The link count went from 2.5 million links back in August 2018 and to 1.2 million links in October 2019 and then 550,000 links in 2022 and now 215,000 links in 2023! So I checked the other day and now I am showing 550,000 links. That is a 91% reduction in the links Google Search Console reported back in 2018.
Here is a screenshot from now showing 215,000 links:
Here is a screenshot from July 2022 showing 550,000 links:
October 2019 at 1.2 million links:
August 2018 at 2.5 million links:
I know in 2021, Google said the link report is not a priority for Google, John Mueller said then “I don’t see any need to spend lots of resources on the links report – it’s not something we tell people to focus on.”
Here is another complaint on Twitter:
@rustybrick did you see that Google cleaned links in SC? From <2000 to 1. pic.twitter.com/5PGaxhM1Hl
— Kevin Kyburz (@swissky) July 20, 2023
@rustybrick did you see that Google cleaned links in SC? From <2000 to 1. pic.twitter.com/5PGaxhM1Hl
And you can see more screenshots and complaints here in the comments – I am sure more will add screenshots in the comments section in this post.
Do you see fewer links? Do you think this is a “feature” or a bug?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: John Mueller from Google said there is nothing wrong, he posted on Twitter, “I checked with the team; they say overall things are stable, so it doesn’t look like an outage or anything like that. In any large & dynamic system, numbers will fluctuate, I imagine that’s what we’re seeing here. (But I’ll keep an eye on the mentions too, just in case.”
I checked with the team; they say overall things are stable, so it doesn’t look like an outage or anything like that. In any large & dynamic system, numbers will fluctuate, I imagine that’s what we’re seeing here. (But I’ll keep an eye on the mentions too, just in case :-))
— John Mueller (official) · Not #30D (@JohnMu) July 21, 2023
I checked with the team; they say overall things are stable, so it doesn’t look like an outage or anything like that. In any large & dynamic system, numbers will fluctuate, I imagine that’s what we’re seeing here. (But I’ll keep an eye on the mentions too, just in case :-))
Update 2: On July 24th, Google has confirmed there is an issue and it should be addressed in a week or so:
To update here, we did find something; your links haven't been given the disallow treatment, fed to a panda, 410'ed, hit by premature link rot, or gotten ghosted by Googlebot. Hopefully it'll be resolved this week. Thanks for your patience & sorry for the back & forth.
— John Mueller (official) · Not #30D (@JohnMu) July 24, 2023
To update here, we did find something; your links haven't been given the disallow treatment, fed to a panda, 410'ed, hit by premature link rot, or gotten ghosted by Googlebot. Hopefully it'll be resolved this week. Thanks for your patience & sorry for the back & forth.
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