Have you noticed a drop in number of links in Google Search Console (GSC)? Many SEO professionals have noticed it over the past month and this has sparked widespread concern. This has also created confusion in the SEO community. Leonard Brahm (@LeonardBrahm) was one of the first professionals who raised the alarm. He observed a 30% reduction in the reported links for his website. Several others shared similar experiences on various forums including WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help.
Some users argue they have witnessed a drastic decrease in external backlinks from high-quality domains. One of them said to have lost more than 1,000 links in a single update. However, it is also reported that links from low-quality sites remained unaffected. It is now widely speculated that Google might not be indexing certain content anymore and this is the reason of the missing links. Some are optimistic and argues Google is including the pages in its AI dataset and this is the reason the links are now being removed from the live index.
Some also raised the issue of decreasing number of indexed pages. One user said that 20,000 URLs are no longer indexed. He cited the Search Console data.
SEO professionals reveal a significant drop in total backlinks has been reported. One of them wrote that a drop of about 60% was noticed despite months of consistency prior to the issue. One another user said that all external links to their homepage has now disappeared. However, the page is still indexed and ranking well. He is now worried about potential penalties or technical errors on the site.
A similarly incident was noticed in June 2023. Google then confirmed a bug in the link report.
