We've been hearing a lot of reports from SEOs that the Links report in Google Search Console shows a lot less links than it did a month ago. We're not sure if this affects all SEOs, but a lot of SEOs are complaining about it.
Leonard Brahm @LeonardBrahm was the first to bring this to my attention, and I subsequently found complaints on WebmasterWorld and the Google Webmaster Help Forums. Leonard noticed a 30% drop in the number of reported links on one of the sites he had access to.
Other complaints include:
Has anyone noticed a huge drop in the number of external backlinks from actual high DA domains on GSC? Google removed over 1,000 links at once, leaving the crappy .id site links (that they blocked with a disavow file) alone, but instead removing links from very high quality, high domain authority sites.
Are Google currently removing valid links, or are they removing them because they are no longer indexing the content? Does it mean that once Google includes a page in their AI dataset, they no longer intend to keep it in their live index?
By the way, I also noticed something about links: in addition, the pages in the index continue to decrease, and according to Search Console, there are already 20,000 unindexed URLs.
I just checked and my total backlinks today are down about 60%.
It's been consistent for months now.
All external links to my home page have disappeared in Google Search Console. I have 483 links to my home page and I check it once a week. I checked and the site/page is indexed, ranking well, not penalized, redirects seem to work fine, and the site prefix in the reports is correct. What could be causing this? Should I be worried that my rankings have dropped and that my site has technical errors or will be penalized?
The last time I reported on link drops in Google Search Console was in June 2023, and Google finally confirmed the link reporting bug.
Here's what it looks like now (more links than there were back then, but buggy):
Below is a screenshot showing 215,000 links in June 2023.
Below is a screenshot showing 550,000 links in July 2022.
October 2019 1.2 million links:
August 2018 2.5 million links:
Have you noticed a drop in links in this report?
Forum discussions at WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help Forums.