Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) has been extremely turbulent in the last few days. On the morning of Tuesday, the 5th of Feb I was doing my routine checks on the websites in GWT that I am working on and noticed that there were significant drops in the number of links reported via “Traffic > Links to Your Site”. We are talking some drastic changes here, from a steady number of about 2.5k links down to 200 links. And as of today, it declined further to only double digits.
Some coverage here:
http://dejanseo.com.au/google-webmaster-tools-now-with-less-link-data/
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/webmaster-tools/_r3YwCyJvB4[1-25-true]
http://searchengineland.com/sudden-change-in-the-number-of-links-reporting-in-google-webmaster-147916
Apparently there has been a glitch with how data is being displayed in GWT, John Mueller from Google have acknowledged and confirmed this.
The Plot Thickens
In addition to the link data being falsely represented in GWT, I also noticed this morning that the “not selected” option in the Index Status report has gone missing?
The “not selected” segment was previously represented in a green and has now mysteriously gone missing. Have checked it across multiple accounts and the behaviour is consistent across all of them.
Anyone else out there are experiencing the same behaviour in their GWT? Are Google preparing an update to GWT? Do you think that they will be providing us with more transparency in GWT?
Who knows?
Update 08/02/2013 @ 9.28pm – Apparently John Mueller from Google confirmed that the removal of ‘not selected’ because it was causing too much confusion. Check out the response and discussion here.