I did the sitemap generator in April and uploaded it and pointed to that file in my Robot.txt file. When I ran the sitemap generator I used a lot of excludes, including images, because I have ecommerce site – www.bluesagebeads.com
The problem is the Google, MSN and Ask are not seeing my external links when I do a link search. For some reason, Yahoo is seeing them – about 900. The weird thing is, when I log into my Google sitemap account it shows some external links – about 78. All of the SE’s are seeing my pages, but not my external links. I’ve posted to Google Webmasters forum and really didn’t get anywhere. The answer I got was that Google is won’t list links unless they are high-quality links. Considering that DMOZ and Yahoo (the second largest SE) should be considered high-quality links and they’re not being listed, I don’t think that answer makes much sense.
It seems to be more of a technical problem that isn’t exclusive to Google. Could the problems be the excludes? Any ideas on what the problem is would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Helkat
You are talking about backlinks, right? If so, the search engines play with this all the time and produce rendom results on purpose. You can have 100 good backlinks, but google may only show 5 or 6. This does not mean that they are not there, just that google is not showing all of them for you.
It could also be that you created the site in June, have no meta descriptions or keywords and it is just too soon for backlinks to show. Give it some time and then check again.
Thanks AMPC for your reply – any help is appreciated. Actually the site is over 3 1/2 yrs old and there are metas (title, description, keyword) it’s just the sitemap that’s new – prior to that I just used the Google site which I believe was an .asp sitemap. I know there is a new Algorithm so at first I attributed the loss of links to that and I figured that it would just work itself out. But now that I have the same problem w/MSN, ASK, etc… I’m concerned that possibly I have something (or done something wrong) that is confusing the bots.
I’m stumped – they’re all seeing my pages, but none (except Yahoo – scratch that – I just check that today and all inlinks are gone).
HELP!