Google has fixed the issues with the Search Console link report we reported a couple of weeks ago. The issue was the number of links being reported dropped drastically for some site owners.
Resolved. The issue is now resolved. I noticed the links increasing in the report this morning, and then John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, confirmed, saying, “Yeah, I think it should be ok now.”
Reporting glitch only. Google wanted to clarify that this was “just a reporting thing.” The link report did not impact any actual ranking, indexing, or crawling of your website. It just was an issue with the number of links Google displayed in the Search Console link report.
John wrote, “FWIW, it doesn’t have anything to do with how search results work.”
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot from my link report showing an increase in the number of links being reported by Google compared to the previous number. I should add the number is still very low compared to historical data for this site.
Here is the report from a couple of weeks 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 it reported 2.5 million links:
Why we care. Again, this fix did not fix any specific ranking issues. It only fixed the link report in Google Search Console. Those of you who track links this way can go back into the report and hopefully they will find the number of links being reported more appealing.
