Why would I lose 300 links in 19 days?

[Benjamin379]

Hi,

I have recently discovered a loss of 300 links in the space of the last 19 days. What would cause this? Is there a new algorithm in place that I am unaware of? I'm totally baffled, as the links should have increased, not decreased?

Thanks,

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Benjamin,

Do you mean in OpenSiteExplorer or Google? OSE just released an update, and we could have just not crawled some of the links you had before -- they could be there, it's just that we didn't crawl that site this time.

[tdawson09]

If you are referring to outside links to your website, as report in Google Webmaster Tools, I had a similar issue where the links reported in GWT were reduced in the thousands. I closely watched my rankings and metrics, which were not affected, I concluded that Google was doing some clean up work in GWT. Those links that I lost were not valued links, and Google probably wasn't given them any value, so removed them from their report list.

I would suggest to just watch you metrics closely to determine if it affects your ranking positions. If not, then it is probably just a clean up issue on Google's part.