SEOs have heard so much about the importance of backlinks that some reports of missing data in the “Links to your site” section of Webmaster Tools is enough to spark industry-wide panic. In the past few weeks, some webmasters have noticed between 60 and 80 percent of their sites’ link profile data were unaccounted for in Google’s reports, according to The Search Engine Roundtable.
Fear not – Google’s Webmaster Help Forum recently made an official announcement, explaining the search engine is aware of the issue and is looking into the root cause.
“You do not need to take any action. We hope to have the normal data shown again in the near future. The data shown there is informational and does not affect your site’s crawling, indexing or ranking,” the official announcement explains.
This update gives SEOs a reason to breathe a sigh of relief, as recent Penguin updates have left some sites with questionable backlink profiles at the bottom of SERPs. However, it also goes to show just how important links are, and will continue to be for SEO content in years to come.
