Links (external and total) have significantly decreased in 1 month from August to October - why?
-
Greetings,
After comparing a few stats in one of my campaigns, I noticed that External Followed Links, Total External Links, and Total Links significantly decreased from August 29th to when I just checked them a few days ago (October 3).
Any ideas on why this happened?
For example, Total External Links went from 50,589 to 39,203.
Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Jenny
-
I'm still trying to get access to GWT for this client, so will definitely check that out. Good call and thanks!!
-
Kyle,
Thanks again for the ongoing help and information - you rock! Our domain authority stayed the same. I'll definitely check out the links to the resources you provided as well. Thanks again!
Jenny
-
Jenny, here is a full list of post were rand and other SEOMoz associates talk about the updates to the mozscape index (which powers OSE and the pro tools):
http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=mozscape+update%3A
In regards to your question of what is mozscape here is another great resource:
http://www.seomoz.org/help/what-is-mozscape
In regards to your last question, it sounds like it was a blend of you losing some links and the mozscape fluctuations. Always take OSE data with a grain of salt, that information is simply to give you insight to trends in your link profile. Did your domain authority drop or stay the same during the changes?
- Kyle
-
Yeah this is the first thing you should do. WMT should give you a more exact number of links than OSE, and those numbers don't tend to fluctuate as much - unless there is an actual loss/gain of a larger number of links/LRDs.
-
Can't believe I didn't think of this earlier, but are you comparing the numbers you're getting here to the numbers you're getting from Google Webmaster Tools? Did you also see a drop in backlinks there?
-
I just learned about vlookup this year. Super useful for cross-referencing spreadsheets.
Here's how it works. In the same Excel document, you will have two sheets. The first one will have all the data from your last OSE report, the one with 50K links. (I'm assuming you exported this.) The second sheet will have all the data from your more recent OSE report, the one with 30k links. The vlookup function will quickly check if something on the first sheet is also on the second sheet.
If it's on the first sheet but not on the second sheet, then that's one of the links that "disappeared." Look those over, check for patterns, test some of them. Maybe you had a sitewide link on a giant website, and that website just went down. But if the missing links are still online, then OSE simply didn't crawl them this time.
If you've never used vlookup before, it's worth spending a few hours reading tutorials, watching videos (tons on YouTube!), and learning the syntax. Best of luck!
-
I'm not familiar with the vlookup function. Is it pretty difficult? I'm pretty good at research and picking things up though so if that's the way to go about it I can give it a go.
Thanks so much for your ongoing assistance.
Jenny
-
How comfortable are you with Excel? Do you know how to use the vlookup function?
-
Forgive this newbie response, but how do I check to see which URLs have disappeared? There are over 10,000 Total External Links which disappeared so let me know if there's an easy way to do this please.
-
Hmm, interesting. I'm new to the pro tool so please forgive this question - but what exactly is the mozscape index and why does it fluctuate?
One competitor went down slightly and another went up, so it seems specific to only our site. So does that indicate a mozscape index fluctuation or something different?
Thanks so much for your help!
-
Have you checked the disappearing URLs to see if they're still online?
-
Keep in mind if you are pulling these stats from OSE or the pro tool that the amount of domains and URLs differ each time they update the mozscape index. So the total amounts may change depending on the variations from those two months.
Have you noticed this change with your competitors sites as well or is it specific to only our site?
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
-
Are there any strategies (Moz-specific or other) on how to improve the Total Links metric against competitors?
In competitive link metrics, our client is doing very well in every metric against every competitor except in Total Links against one competitor in particular. Wondering how to improve this metric against this one competitor. Any strategies, whether MOZ-specific or other that can boost this metric? Thanks.
Moz Pro | | buffalonickel0 -
Inbound link cleanup and management
Hey guys this is my first time asking a question here but I have been lurking for a while now and have learned a lot here. I have to come up with a plan to go through, analyze, and clean up the existing backlinks for 37 root domains. That to me makes manually looking through the stack one at a time impossible. Obviously there are some great tools and I currently have Moz tools and Raven available to me but am open to acquire something different as well if it makes sense. My questions are: 1. Do I need to worry about nofollow links at all? Should I just separate them out right off the top and be done with that? 2. What ways have you all accomplished this task? Are there any time sucking pitfalls to avoid? Any insight would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance this site truly has been a blessing to me!
Moz Pro | | RossM0 -
Losing links
my blog/website is at ocpatentlawyer.com. My reports are showing that I'm losing links. Is there a way to find out which links I've been losing to see if it is something that I should be concerned about?
Moz Pro | | jamesjd710 -
Link buying: finding sites based on criteria
Hi. I'm looking to get links to my site from blogs/sites/pages that fit this criteria: niche: IT, electronics, product reviews Minimum PR: 2 Maximum 20 external links Is there an automated tool that can help me discover these site?
Moz Pro | | seo_marker0 -
MozRank per Link: Valuable or Worthless?
Since the MozRank and MozTrust metrics are on a logarithmic scale, I'm wondering if it's still valuable to get a general idea of the quality of a site's link profile by calculating: MozRank / Total Links MozTrust / Total Links Would this be useful, or is it always going to be higher for sites with lower MozRank & MozTrust since it's "easier" to achieve the lower values?
Moz Pro | | conquerapathy-644120 -
Links not appearing on Open Site Explorer
My site gained several new inbound links during December and only two of them are not all showing up on the latest Linkscape update. It seems to be the links that were created at the end of the month which are showing up, whereas a handful at the beginning of the month are nowhere to be seen. All the linking pages have been indexed by Google the links are do-follow, and one of the sites in particular is not obsure and has a DA in the 90's. I appreciate the Linkscape doesn't index everything, but I would have thought that more tof the results of my efforts would have shown up in OSE. I'd be really grateful if anyone could explain this to me please. Thanks Ben
Moz Pro | | atticus70 -
Strange metrics : Internal Followed Links 0
Hi All, I don't understand the metrics for this website http://www.tntaccess.fr : http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.tntaccess.fr%252F/a!metrics There is 0 internal followed links, is it normal? because there are internal followed links for this website. Or there is something I dont understand. It is penalizing for the website? how do we correct this? does it come from the robot text file? Thanks a lot for your help Anne
Moz Pro | | ahernoux0 -
Why would PA be 1 (0 links from 0 root domains) if it's linked to internally?
Question just about said it all: I've seen a number of pages on sites that have a PA of 1 (with the metrics being 0 links from 0 root domains) when I can see on the site that it is linked to internally - from the main nav (which is CSS, not Javascript) and also from the footer, if not other places. Why would this be? Update: upon looking further at the site, it appears that there's some kind of redirect going on, where the page linked to from the nav actually redirects to the real page. Would that eliminate PA, even if it's a 301? And additionally, is whatever is causing this lack of PA a reflection of how Google would relate to the page? Thanks, Aviva
Moz Pro | | debi_zyx0