Google has confirmed an issue with the link report within Google Search Console. The issue seems to be impacting the number of links shown in that report.
John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, said “To update here, we did find something” with the link report. He added, “Hopefully it’ll be resolved this week.”
Link report issues. Last week I covered how many are noticing huge drops in the number of links being reported by Google Search Console’s link report. Initially, John Mueller said there was nothing wrong with the report but then this morning, John apologized for the back and forth and said the team did find an issue.
Here are screenshots of my site showing a fraction of the number of links than it did 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 it reported 2.5 million links:
Some are reporting only a handful of links being reported by Google Search Console and some are reporting zero links being accounted for.
Google fixing the issue. John Mueller from Google said a fix should be out sometime this week. Will it bring back all of those missing links or just fix the issue for some users seeing a fraction of the number of links? It is unknown, but we will keep an eye on things.
Why we care. Truth is, counting the links you have in Search Console is not going to make much of a difference in terms of how much traffic you get from Google Search or how well you rank in Google Search. So I wouldn’t be concerned if Google is showing fewer links in these reports than you expect.
But it is good to know which sites are linking to you and for those reports to be accurate.
