The link data that Google reports used to get updated once a month at best, so the current situation is progress.

Why does it update by bits? I'd say the main issue is one of scale. The web holds a seriously large number of ever-changing links. The closer Google can get to "real time" updates, the more accurate and actionable the data would be. But they will always put more priority on the SERPs rather than webmaster reporting.

My WMT internal link data updates regular as clockwork every three days.

However sometimes an update is missed and it is six days instead.

My reported links went from 17k to 123k. Not sure what to make of it.

40k to 2400k two days ago. Today 2600k

I guess the boots are working and it is good news !

40k to 2400k two days ago. Today 2600k

How did you suddenly get so many new backlinks?

I can think of two possible explanations:

1.The GWT data is erronious, and these reported backlinks don't really exist.


2.The web is continually being flooded with millions of new ephemeral random spam backlinks created by automated methods, and these are what GWT is reporting.

But I don't knwo which explanation is correct

The data is erroneous.

For internal links I see 130 000 internal links come from www.example.com but only 20 000 internal links come from *.example.com.

That cannot be right.

Some pages supposedly have thousands more internal incoming links than there are pages on the site!

Clicking through to view the list of URLs pointing to any particular page, shows very few links, nothing like the advertised number supposedly pointing at that URL.

g1smd,

I am seeing the same thing. Incoming and internal are way, way off. By about 10,000 as far as I can see.

ULSs in the index seem to be off too by about 3000 and this is just one site out of many.

They call these tools, yet I get frustrated at how innacurate they can be. Would be nice if G could build some tools worth a using.

If this report were coming from someone other that g1smd, I might write it off as a website that has canonical problems. But given that g1smd has traditionally been one of the hawks around canonical fixes, I'm sure it's not the reason for what he's seeing.