Help! Links to my site disappeared from Google

[caromero1965]

Hi,

I webmaster for an arts-related online magazine, Culturekiosque.com. We've been on the Web about eight years, and had thousands of inbound links, all developed organically (no link swaps, no "free-for-alls", etc.), including many from Yahoo! (we used to provide movie reviews for them), Open Directory, some in Wikipedia etc... MSN still shows our site has having 8146 inbound links. Google, until recently, likewise showed well over 5000 inbound links (I forget the exact number).

A couple of weeks ago, however, things suddenly changed. We now have only about 450 inbound links in pages covered by google, based on the "link:www.culturekiosque.com" query. Our traffic sent by Google, which was previously close to a thousand visitors per day, suddenly dropped about 90% or more. We still have PageRank 7 for our home page and 6 for many internal pages, but this isn't translating into visitors any more... Google still indexes the thousands of pages of content we publish, but the inbound links to us are what's suddenly cratered out of the blue.

The only thing I know of that may have changed is, we used to have a page with links back to thousands of pages that had shown up as referrers in our traffic logs, and I think that page was inadvertently removed about six months ago in a site redesign. I suppose it's possible that for quite a number of those sites we were the main inbound link, but I don't know that for a fact.

Has anyone ever seen this kind of sudden change before? Any explanations? If we were being penalized I'd think our own pages would disappear, rather than links to us from other sites, which is what seems to have happened.

I'd appreciate any suggestions.

-Antonio

http://www.culturekiosque.com/calendar -- guide to arts and entertainment in major cities around Europe, the US and worldwide

[cbp]

Ignore the link: command in Google - its meaningless.

CBP

[dburdon]

Caromero,

the Google link command is showing 290 backlinks. But I'd agree with CBP, its only a snapshot. Check your backlinks with MSN and Yahoo to get a better picture.

[caromero1965]

...I wouldn't be that worried if it weren't for the huge drop in our traffic from Google at the same moment-- something has definitely changed. Our pages are still indexed, but something we did definitely got us on the Enemies List... and it's caused a 60%+ drop in our revenue for the last few weeks, which is catastrophic. It's very clear when this happened-- traffic just goes off a cliff one day.

I have no idea what could be behind it. I did just discover that Google somehow spidered a "test" site that has a more-or-less complete mirror of the live site-- there shouldn't be any outside-world links to it, so I don't know how they found it. (It's on a new server that's supposed to take over hosting the main site in a few weeks.) I'll have to update the robots.txt on it to block the Google spider...

Could it be that we're being penalized for the duplicate?

Thanks for any advice.