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Have you checked out link count in Google Webmaster Tools today? If not, you may be in for a surprise when you do. It seems like most people's link counts are incredibly inflated.
A Google Webmaster Help thread and WebmasterWorld thread has several webmasters noticing the major inflation of their link counts in Google Webmaster Tools.
Personally, I see Google is telling me I have 974,494 links to this site. But some people are reporting just under 2.5 million links, where millions were added over a single night. Here is one report:
Today i have seen my webmaster account for my site to see "links to your site" section. It amazed me when i saw a figure "2,439,598" which is thousand times higher then what i've noted yesterday. Is it a bug in webmaster tools, or i actually have all these links.
So if you see some numbers that don't make sense in the Google link tool report, don't worry - it seems fairly wide spread.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
ilan
06/29/2010 01:06 pm
Barry, I'm sorry to be picky... but: "2,439,598" is not "over 2.5 million" it's more like "just under 2.5 million"
Barry Schwartz
06/29/2010 01:14 pm
Heh, fixed.
Chris
06/29/2010 02:14 pm
The WMW thread shows people losing links, but for at least a couple clients I'm seeing huge increases. Like from to 42,000 to 7.1 million and change, spread across a number of pages.
MOGmartin
06/29/2010 03:48 pm
Im seeing 3,740,918 to seoforums.org - up from a few hundred thousand last week. yahoo consistently returns just over a million - I wonder if this new figure from google is actually the "truth"?
Wissam
06/29/2010 11:51 pm
i think if i am not wrong .. google is showing how much u have actual links to your site and they provide a sample when you go into the list ... because 1 of our clients showing about 6500 to home page and when u go and check the list its only shows 1200... but the "total Links" kinda agrees with YSE
Wissam
06/29/2010 11:56 pm
Just want to add that i checked my gwt for our site ... the home page have 160,904 links heheh...
Ramesh
06/30/2010 03:41 am
Yes, its true. Even my webmasters also showing same kind of results. Although, we have checked the whole list and observe many links are still missing so waiting for them as well.
marty
06/30/2010 10:25 am
I wouldn't get excited anyone. Almost all my bonus links (about 8 times real number) have been credited to a interior page which i have not actively marketed and that there is no grerat reason for anyone to link to It is definately a bug in my opinion
No Name
06/30/2010 12:18 pm
See At the Bottom you can see the actual figure.for one of my site it showing 9463 but when i saw the bottom of the page i can see 1-100 of 882 and also by downloading all the external links you can check out the actual links to your site.