Your turn to help me –
Once upon a time, WordPress’ incoming links box would give me a list of the latest posts in the blogosphere that linked back to green LA girl’s pages. Those were good times.
But since a few months ago, WordPress’ incoming links box started filling up mostly with links to posts that don’t actually link back to me. Instead, they’ll link to the latest posts from blogs that have me on their sidebar blogroll.
Take this example from last night. Racked LA and Eater LA are indeed linking to me in those posts, but California in Texas and Bikes in the City are not — they just happen to link to me in their sidebar.
Why is this happening to me, and how can I make WordPress revert back to the way it used to populate my “Incoming Links” box way back when?
Yep, its happening to everyone. I track my sites in Google reader and its picking up every single site that I am in a blogroll of. Very inconvenient.
Comment by David — January 20, 2009 @ 7:15 pm
I have exactly the same problem with my WordPress blog. Well, not exactly; I have also visited sites that have reputedly linked to my blog, only to find no link whatsoever — and often, no reason why they would link to me.
If you get an answer, let us know.
Comment by bikinginla — January 20, 2009 @ 10:40 pm
I’ve noticed the same thing. It looks like the results in that incoming links box are simply the results of a Google Blog search for anyone linking to http://greenlagirl.com/ on their blog (not taking into account if the link is in a post or a sidebar). I’m wondering if the increased use of sidebar widgets like Google Reader shared items and Delicious bookmarks is starting to throw off the search results a bit?
I’ve been thinking of using Google Alerts or Yahoo Pipes to check for new incoming links to my blog–or any mention of my blog for that matter, but I’m not sure if the results will be any different. I guess there is only one way to find out. :)
Comment by Tomas — January 20, 2009 @ 10:53 pm
Tomas, the results will be the same, as I use Google Alerts to track mine.
Comment by David — January 21, 2009 @ 6:31 am
this is because google changed the way that they do their indexing for their blog search service, which is what wordpress uses to get the links.
they say that they are going to fix it: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018885.html
Comment by jim winstead — January 21, 2009 @ 9:59 am
Well I’m glad to know the problem’s not unique to me — I thought I had somehow messed up something on the back end.
Hope Google fixes the prob. soon though. The post Jim linked to’s informative — but is from over a month ago — wonder how long it’ll take?!
Comment by Siel — January 21, 2009 @ 10:17 am