I today checked one of my client website in Google Webmaster Tools and saw that there is a huge increase in the backlinks . Is this a fault in Google Webmaster Tool tracking ? . Many of my friends too experienced the same. I think the reason might be that Google has started counting all links which are not previously considered to be a priority. I have checked the same with SEO Round Table and came to the following post http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022454.html

I think this might not be a techincal error as I have already heard that Google will start to give no follow links also linkjuice but the priority to this links would be very less considered to do follow links. We would all have to wait until we hear what the Google Webmaster Team has to speak.

This will inturn be a big change and this might be just shift in link importance and authority. Google might want the webmasters to be aware of all the pages which link to their website. This seems to have lot of positive impact like we can analyze which linkfarms/content spams are linked to our website and we might also get an additional feature to report spam websites which link to our website.

I am not doing a strong research now but I will wait till I hear something from other SEO Experts.

Have you recently noticed this type of a link count difference in your webmaster tools accounts ? What do you feel about the change ? Do you think that Google is now going to change the way they give priority to backlinks ? I would like to see you comments about this topic.

You can also discuss the same with me through my Twitter Account

Most of the webmasters do not do proper redirection of old pages when the website is redesigned/revamped into an entire new one. The effect is that there will lot of broken links and you will also lose alot of inbound links. Here is a way to check the issue and if you do have old broken URL's you can turn them into effective link resources.

Go to Google Webmaster tools dashboard -- Your Website URL -- Diagnostics -- Crawl Errors -- Web Crawls -- Not Found.

You will now get a list of not found URL’s on your website . There will be a "Linked From" towards the right which shows the pages which are linking to not found pages. You can see the step by step guide about this on Google webmaster central blog.

We have now found the inbound links which are linked to old URL's. Now we need to ensure that this pages are linking to the new pages on our website. If they are not then we can send them a request to link to the new pages on our website. Meanwhile we can also redirect the old pages to the new pages on our website.