Links in Google Webmaster Tools

[caravan]

I've been dealing with the SEO for a website of a valve manufacturer. Since I started monitoring the stats for the site in May this year I've noticed a drop in the number of pages indexed (from 1000+ in May to 300+ now). In August the number of inbound links displayed in the Google Webmaster Tool panel displayed zero links. At the time I thought this maybe due to an update and figured this would come back.

However, last month this was still displaying zero links and the last index date hadn't changed and was still August. After looking into possible problems I identified some duplicate content issues with multiple domain names (co.uk, .de. dk) which all aliased to the main .eu website but retained their own domain. I've addressed this problem by using 301's on the surrounding domains so they all redirect to the main domain. I then requested a re-crawl. I've just checked the webmaster tools again and google is now showing it last indexed the site 21st October but is still displaying zero links. The results in the SERP's don't seem to be affected. Also the number of internal links is displaying zero.

Has anyone come across this problem before? Could it be a symptom of a problem such as duplicate content or a bug in the google control panel? If it's a duplicate content issue which has been resolved will the links come back?

[tamecrow]

Where are your links mostly coming from? It's quite likely that crap links are now being heavily devalued in the SERPs.

[incrediblehelp]

Agree Tamecrow. What kind of links are we talking about here.

[caravan]

Links wise there's nothing much out of the ordinary. We certainly don't part-take in buying or selling links. Here's the inbound links as returned by Yahoo. There's certainly not a massive amount of links there and this is something that needs to be increased. There's nothing there which I'd consider to be dodgy. The subsidiary domains have all been 301'ed to the main site now so any duplicate content issues should in time be removed.

Should there be an issue with the type or quality of those inbound links why would this affect the number of internal links reported in the webmasters tool panel?

[incrediblehelp]

So the big drop your referring to was only on the .eu domains name right? Maybe you simply seeing drops because they are removing some of the different language versions (Dansk, Deutsch or English) of the website from Google.com?

[mit]

Actually, I have checked today. It shows about 3201links for my website in Google Webmaster tools but just in the heading, there is no link details inside it - Showing "No Link Found".

[caravan]

incrediblehelp, the drop in links displayed in the webmaster tools control panel occurred prior to me addressing the multiple domain names issue. The results in the SERP's don't seem to have been affected just the control panel failing to show the number of inbound links for both external sites and internal navigation.

Could it be a bug with the google panel itself? I've tried to find a method of contact for Google but can't seem to find anything relvant.

[incrediblehelp]

Could be a bug, dont know for sure. I remember hearing about one in the past few weeks.