Google's Big Daddy Update - Have you lost links in the search engines lately?
 

This has been a Big PITA... We have lost over a million links in one forum thanks to the "Big Daddy" update Google had a few months back. We went from about 1,100,000 links/refs in Google down to about 19,000 right now! :( That really stinks... Fortunately, we still have over 1/2 a million in Yahoo but traffic has definitely taken a hit.

Has anyone else lost links in their forums in Google?

If you don't already know how to check you probably won't know unless you have just seen a decrease in traffic. You can enter the following in Google to find out how many links you have:

"site:yoursite.com"

Hope we were the only one!

David

We noticed a drop in visitors in Mid february - was this when it happened ?

I believe that is when it started. I noticed the major loss in links in February but it wasn't until the first of March (I think) when the traffic levels dropped. I think this is due to when Google actually updates.

Did you get your traffic levels back to previous amounts since then, Paul?

I noticed too... interesting...

No. They are about 60% max atm.

February 20/21 is when the level dropped - by over 50% at the time.

Really interesting. Feb 20-21 is when we saw a huge increase of search bots activity on our forums.

With regards to search bots... Around the time this took place we got absolutely hammered and it continued on for probably 3 weeks? It tapered off about the time the loss of link traffic actually kicked in.
My hope is that next month a lot of this re-indexing will start to show up. At least I sure hope it does!

I have heard some stories of forums that have actually gained a lot of links and traffic over this, but I think most of them did not have a lot of links to start with.

thats absolutely right, index and links both have gone down no words yet from G
another interesting thing to notice recently was a abnormal PR increase for new sites.

some of sites started weeks ago ranked straightly from 0 to 3 or 4.

i never understood that rank thing mind explainning?

Our site went from third place down to the 12th page back in December, and this recent update of Google's actually helped ours... we're back up to 4th place.