Google Shows Webmasters More Links In Webmaster Tools

If you look at your link report in Google Webmaster Tools you may notice that Google is telling you have more links than you had the last time you looked. In fact, some are reporting they are seeing millions of additional links.

At first, I thought that this may be some reporting bug. But today, I found that Google is now showing more and more links due to having a larger and fresher index. Yes, since Caffeine went live, Google is now able to index more and more content, at a quicker pace, which leads to them being able to report more data in Google Webmaster Tools.

JohnMu said in a Google Webmaster Help thread, when questioned about the increase in links:

Yes, we revamped the data behind the backlinks feature in Webmaster Tools — it has started using more data from “Caffeine” for some sites and is planned to continue with a bit more data in the next week or so. The goal is to have more fresher & up-to-date data there :-).

If you see new links in the report, don’t worry – it should just grow even more and become more accurate over time.