Google Webmaster Tools Links Report Wrong

Apr 21, 2011 - 8:50 am 8 by

Google Link Report BugGoogle confirmed a bug with the link report tool within Google Webmaster Tools.

In a Google Webmaster Help thread, Googler Asaph Zemach confirmed an issue with links being reported to specific web sites were inflated and wrong.

Asaph said in response to some complaints:

We had a problem in one of our backend systems that caused this issue.

We believe the problem is now fixed. I checked onewayfurniture.com in WMT and the "links to your site" data looks correct now.

Please let us know if you are still seeing issues. Note that it's next to impossible for us to debug problems without a site name to work with.

We apologize of the inconvenience and thanks for using WMT.

What I found pretty interesting outside of the issue with the report and it coming a day after I published the poll results saying 68% feel Google Webmaster Tools isn't accurate is that the site in question here was just published in a big story in the Wall Street Journal.

The Wall Street Journal article is named Sites Retool for Google Effect and covers one web site, this onewayfurniture.com site, that took a big hit. And Googlers are responding to onewayfurniture.com's questions in Google Webmaster Help forums.

Anyway, I am not sure how wide spread the bug was with the Google link report tool, but I wanted to make sure you all knew about it.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

 

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