Google has confirmed an issue with the link report in Google Search Console. The issue appears to be affecting the number of links shown in this report.
Google search advocate John Mueller, said “To update here, we found something” with the link report. He added: “We hope it will be resolved this week.”
Link report issues. Last week I explained how many are realizing it huge drops in the number of links reported by the Google Search Console link report. John Mueller initially said there was nothing wrong with the report, but this morning, John apologized for the back-and-forth and said the team found a problem.
Here are screenshots of my site showing a fraction of the number of links a year ago and then years and years ago:
The screenshot above is from this week, but the screenshot below is from July 2022:
If we go back to August 2018, you can see that 2.5 million links have been reported:
Some report that Google Search Console only reports a handful of links, and others report that no links are counted at all.
@rustybrick Have you seen Google cleaning up links on SC? From <2000 to 1. pic.twitter.com/5PGaxhM1Hl
— Kevin Kyburz (@swissky) July 20, 2023
Google fixing the problem. Google’s John Mueller said a fix should come out sometime this week. Will it bring back all those missing links or just fix the problem for some users seeing a fraction of the number of links? It is unknown, but we will be waiting for things.
Why we care The truth is that counting the links you have in Search Console won’t change much in terms of how much traffic you get from Google Search or how well you rank in Google Search. So I wouldn’t worry about Google showing fewer links in these reports than you expect.
But it’s good to know which sites are linking to you and that those reports are accurate.
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