The webmaster forums are lit up with reports that the Google Webmaster Toolbar is showing zero backlinks, and some are reporting a decrease in traffic shortly after.
What’s more, according to the forum reports, these are organic links, not paid links. Google’s assault on paid linking is well-documented by now, but many webmasters are scratching their heads about this one, considering that links are (assumedly) a large consideration of the Google ranking algorithm.
The reports have been made and echoed by members, some reporting that, coupled with their recent drop in PageRank, have seen a decrease in search traffic by up to 15 percent.
Some suppose that it may be a temporary update and thus, only a fluctuation. Others note that Yahoo is showing all of their backlinks in tact.
“D2002” at DigitalPoint forum says:
One of my websites right now is showing 0 internal/external backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools.
However, when I do a “link:” search in Google, I still get about 1000 results. Yahoo is showing 55,000 links for the entire domain.
Our PR has dropped from 6 to 3 (probably permanently, since we are showing 3s across all datacenters).
Our referral traffic from Google decreased a bit (dropped about 15%) but that could just be a daily fluctuation.
And that report is echoed at Google Groups as well as Webmaster World.
Via SE Roundtable
