External Links Massive Drop
-
In Google Webmaster Tools I have well over 1000 links. Now I appreciate that this will vary a lot compared to Open Site Explorer but that's showing just 45.
Previously, before the last OSE update on the 28th I had 182 links so this is a big drop. My competitors use similar software (vbulletin forum) and have all increased in links and my actual links haven't dropped at all according to Google Wemaster Tools.)
My MozRank has dropped a lot, as has the authority and trust. I know this is only a guide but it's very frustrating. My PageRank has also dissapeared (although was only 1 a month or two ago) so really not sure what's going on.
Does anyone have any ideas. I haven't done anything that would penalise me in Google, just some tweaking of certain pages to try and help relevance and rankings.
Cheers.
-
Thank you very much for all of that info. Will have a good read and get link building.
-
OK, got your PM. So the short and sweet version is you need more quality links.
OSE shows 23 linking root domains to your entire domain, which is on par with your current PA/DA (doesn't address the drop of course).
Also, for your homepage I see 456 links from 5 domains. Don't focus on total links, it's a deceptive metric. Focus on Linking Root Domains instead of total links - aside from PA & DA, that is the only other monthly metric I track from OSE.
Go to Google Webmaster Tools into the link section, it says 1000 links, but in the top left section titled "Who Links the Most" click "more" and at the top it will say "Top XXXX domains that link to you". What is that number? I'd guess it's under 100? If so, that's confirming what I said above about getting more quality links and focusing on linking root domains.
When I search google for "yoursitename.co.uk" the mentions I find aren't much better, which tells me there's lots of low quality links (not necessarily created by you) and not enough quality ones to balance it out. That said, I do a site:yourdomain.co.uk search and see over 25k URLs indexed, so Google hasn't abolished you from the SERPs...
I'd recommend reading the following two posts. The first will take you 20 minutes to digest at most. The second link should take you a few years to finish doing, and when you're done you'll be far beyond your competitors.
- Growing Popularity & Links / What is Link Building? - SEOMoz Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 7
- Complete List of Link Building Strategies - Point Blank SEO
Focus on delivering quality to your audience and interacting with other forums and sites as often as possible to draw people in, and you'll stick out from the competition.
-
Thank you very much for the advice, really appreciate it. I've sent you a pm with the web address.
Cheers.
-
A 45 to 1000 ratio is fairly low. Rand recently said that they see an average of 40% at the lowest for sites they've compared. For the sites I manage, 25% to 50% is most common.
To me, a ratio that low suggests that they're crappy links, since crappy links typically don't get picked up by OSE, but they're frequently reported by GWT.
If links are no longer showing up on OSE, I'd guess it's because:
- they links have been removed from the sites they were on,
- the links are no longer reachable by the index (in other words they've been pushed deeper into a site and they don't end up getting crawled),
- or they're low-quality links.
The software you use shouldn't affect link counts that are reported, unless perhaps you just changed a ton of URLs, but then your Top Pages tab would show lots of 404s - you wouldn't see the links missing.
Pagerank went through a toolbar update in the last two months, which could explain that drop.
Hard to give any other suggestions without more details. If the URL isn't confidential, I could probably diagnose more specifically than that.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Page Linking Root Domains and Root Domain Linking Root Domains?
hi, i want to know if Page Linking Root Domains is less and Root Domain Linking Root Domains is higher in number, at that time your keyword is highly competitive or less competitive? for example if a keyword having this information:- Page Authority is:-83 Page Linking Root Domains:- 295 Domain Authority is :- 94 Root Domain Linking Root Domains:- 42,399 which point is more important to consider? if you want to bring your keyword on the first page of the Google ?
Competitive Research | | parallelseo0 -
Tool to compare which links competition has but i don't?
Is there a tool that I can use that will show me a list of my competition's links that I don't have?
Competitive Research | | ballhogjoni0 -
Discrepancy in Competitive Link Analysis?
I currently have a campaign set-up that monitors a few competitors compared to our site. When I look at the Root Domain Metrics I see that Company A has 2,053 total external links, and Company B has 1,632 total external links. I wanted to view these links in more detail so I ran Advanced Inbound Links reports. The reports returned 432 results for Company A and 693 results for Company B. Shouldn't these numbers match up with each other, or am I missing something? Also, I noticed that in the Inbound Links analysis for my competitors there are a number of results listed that are not actually inbound links, but are internal links from there own site. Is there a reason these are appearing? I am having problems because I am trying to use this campaign to show the improvements in our site vs our competitors. However, OSE shows dramatically fewer total external links for our site (about 260 vs 3200 in Webmaster Tools) and I cannot tell if the competitor data is accurate? Thanks
Competitive Research | | zazo0 -
Anyone have experience with "Link Research Tools" ?
I'm looking into Linkresearchtools.com for competitive backlink analysis. Already have SEOmoz (obviously) and Majestic. Anyone have any experience with the toolset? If so, what does it do well, what do you like, and where does it fall down? Cheers
Competitive Research | | BedeFahey0 -
Link Landscape Definition
Will someone give me a good definition of "Link Landscape", or a great article on it.
Competitive Research | | Trupanion0 -
Spying On Competitors Links
Hi There, I am looking for a tool that will allow me to learn about the new links our competitors get each month. Do you know a tool that lets you know each time your competitor has a new link?
Competitive Research | | liors0 -
Question regarding back link analysis and anchor text
Hello, I am looking at my competitors back link analysis and comparing a range of link based metrics from the top 10 SERPS. I am then putting this data into excel and comparing our back link profiles. When looking at the anchor text distribution i am not sure whether to look at exact match anchor or phrase match anchor. For example, one of the companies I am looking at holds positions 3 and 4 in the SERPS. Looking at their linking profile I can see that only 1.7% of their links use the exact match anchor 'widget'. Looking at their phrase match anchor is an entirely different story, 93.5% of anchor links contain 'widget' somewhere. i.e. 'cheap widgets', 'widget sale', 'buy widgets at www.examplewidget.co.uk' etc. Obviously their exact match and phrase match anchor distribution tell a completely different story. THIS IS TRUE FOR MANY OF THE TOP 10 SERPS. Therefore, should I be looking at phrase match anchors instead of exact? Side note: would people recommend targeting anchors with 'brandname widget' based on predictions of Google giving weighted anchor more weight. Robert.
Competitive Research | | 87ROB0 -
In Open Site Explorer, what does it mean when a linking page does not contain any reference to the URl entered?
When running Open Site Explorer on a particular URL, I get a list of linking pages. Many of these pages have a high Page Authority. I am assuming that this is a list of pages that presumably link to the URL I entered. First, is this correct? Next, when I click on an entry in the list I don't see any reference to the URL on the page, even viewing the page source. What does this mean and why is the link in the list?
Competitive Research | | jkenyon1