Can You Explain This?

You can hide information, including backlinks, by structuring your webpage properly. I have no idea why you would do that for an outgoing link though, unless the strategy was to use pingback/trackbacks from a blog to attempt to get links from the other end.

If you look at the source for the page our backlink supposedly comes from you might be able to spot if it is hidden or simply not existent any longer.

As far as the number of backlinks, remember not all backlinks are reported. What if I have 1000 No-Follow links which are not showing up in the results? What if those 800 are offset with 800 outgoing links? What if the 30 backlinks included 10 PR5+ websites and the 800 are all PR0?

In order to know the real reasons you will have to dig even deeper into the quality of links, not just the number.

I recently noticed a trick some people use to place invisible backlinks. (Using certain HTML tags). Those links can only be found by looking into the source of the site.

Another possibility is that backlink information is outdated (coming from a cache or something) where it still sees the site as having the links...while in reality the links are already gone.

When you post a comment the recent comments and top commentator plugins used with Wordpress blogs will cause search engines to index hundreds of links from almost all pages of the blog.

After a while all those links will no longer exist on the live web pages.
However, the cache of the search engines will still have the links, leading to hugely disproportionate link numbers.

Once these links have been indexed it will take a while for the numbers to decay with time as new versions of the web pages are indexed.



As far as SERP positioning is concerned, you can determine that using the following factors if you care to:

1.Total Links to the page

2.PR of the page

3.Anchor text of the links

4.PR of the linking pages

5.Keyword density in the page

6.Keyword density in the linking pages

7.Meta tags for non-Google search engines

and several more...so don't bother :p


However, proper keyword density on your page and high PR links with the right keywords are usually sufficient to gain a high SERP position.



Samir

The PR of the backlinks has a great deal to do with how Google ranks your site in the SERP. If you built these 800 backlinks too fast, that might be a factor. If they are all from PR0-PR3 sites that's a factor as well.

I have seen a single PR8 backlink bring a site to PR7. Backlinking is all about QUALITY!

Thanks everyone

It wasn't due to a 'recent comments' widget it is a site I have never seen before and it doesn't have comments. It's really weird, I will check the source code and see what I can find.

Also, anyone can build a web page full of links and simply not link the page.

Or remove the link after it is indexed. The bots will still find the page in many cases.

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