Google to fix link report in Search Console

After numerous reports of Google showing a fraction of the sites links, Google said it will fix an issue with the report.

Chat with SearchBot

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:

Google Links Report 2023 1689849235

The screenshot above is from this week, but the screenshot below is from July 2022:

Google Search Console Link Counts Drop 1656856705

If we go back to August 2018, you can see it reported 2.5 million links:

New Google Search Console Links Overview 1534861619

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.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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