Site has 300+ inbound do follow links, they once all showed up in webmaster but now dont

Question

I under took a link building project on a site, in total around 300 do follow links where made, arictle submissions, directory listings, posts in dofollow forums ect ect built and indexed over a period of 2 months, i havnt been doing much link building on it since.

They all showed up in google webmaster under the links to my site section ? But now NONE of them show up, all that is there are a couple of links from pinterest, and a couple from tumblr blogs (as it happens these links where not built as part of the backlinking campaign).

I know google is undergoing quite allot of changes regarding quality at the moment and ill be the first to point out that the majority of the built links where not of super quality, but they all came from pr2-4 sites. Built much in the same way / quality most backlinking campaigns are done.

Looking through backlink log i have the links are all there and still live.

Is losing your links from google webmaster something any one else has experienced recently, and just because they are not visable in webmaster does that mean google has disregarded them ?

Answer 1

At this point in time pagerank is such a small part of Google's calculation that I doubt these links provide any real benefit, especially in a post Panda SEO world.

What you want to beware is an 'Unnatural Links Penalty'.

To understand the potential consequences of getting one check out this article by Barry Schwarz, and this comment by Google's Johnathan Mueller. Both address the potential work involved in removing the links if Google doesn't like them and flags your site.

I've never particularly trusted the links section in webmaster tools, but now they are actively drowning content farms I would imagine they have stopped showing them to be useful in WT - I'd be very careful indeed with the way you're doing this.