Why the sudden link drop?
-
A the end of November I am showing that our total links were 118k. Current links are 22k. We changed sites early November so that was about three weeks before. What would cause the drop of about 100k links? Or where should I start investigating?
-
The 301s were not right, but we fixed 99% of them in early December. I did double check them this week. Not sure what else to look for.
-
Now hearing more about your situation. I found the answer. When there is a site redesign, sometimes pages can get lost in translation. I had this happened with Leads do com project that I worked on and saw something similar that was going to happen until I spoke and made sure proper 301 for old pages were set to go to the new locations.
This is really important, can you double check to see if this was done properly. If those pages were somehow lost it would be a large contributing factor in the lose of page rank juice, rankings, and overall traffic.
-
We have no direct relationships with anyone. Every link we got just appeared, nobody made an effort to get any. We didn't have a lot of great links anyway. We never had an SEO strategy. We used out of the box software for a decade. Than in Early November we launched a redesigned site and got killed organically. I don't think anyone made a decision to drop us as a link because we never had a strategy and to be honest didn't have that great of links with the few we did have. I will run Majestic now and see what it shows. I really think this is something on our end. We had great developers, but they don't know a lot about seo.
-
This is in stride to what Iriving mentioned. I am not sure of your website's goal or potential, but that is a very alarming drop. Do you know who is linking to you direct; meaning do you have relationship? If not I would try to contact them for an answer why. I mean they could have adjusted their SEO strategy. Maybe the links were site-wide links and they could have changed a design or template that removed your link. Or again, they may have decided to just drop your link and if it was site wide on many of the websites, this would be a close answer to the sudden loss of backlinks and pages that loose rankings in Google's SERP.
-
I am not showing any link spam but I did use ahrefs and a few things came up. We lost 90 backlinks in one day at the end of November. Overal in two months we have gone from 1800 backlinks to 1600. At the end of December we had 380 referring domains and it dropped to 227 in one day, not back up to 330.
-
I would consider what Irving mentioned above. It's time to do a link audit using a power tool like Majestic SEO. You could had a huge link partner disco from your website. This affect can drop a bomb on your website if your problem is indeed external.
-
Did you see my response above about Google reporting the 404/soft404s that are missing pages. This could be CMS related. What CMS system are you using?
-
I am showing no soft 404s and no server errors. Where would I see the 404s? We actually don't use cms we had a site custom built.
-
I am showing no soft 404s and no server errors. Where would I see the 404s? We actually don't use cms we had a site custom built.
-
I used screaming from and didn't see any duplicates. All status codes were 200. What else should I be looking for?
-
Google should let you click on the pages that are showing 404 or soft404. You can see the location and do a little research yourself. Chances are you/your organization might have deleted some pages by accident or your cms system is could be jacked up. 404s are a very bad thing for your website and organic traffic.
-
How do I find out in WMT if they were internal or external? Three things in WMT that seem like problems. End of December have about 250k indexed pages. The following week we have 80k. Mid November we have about 3k not found now we have 225k not found. For the sitemap we have about 18k submitted and only 9k indexed.
-
Try to use Majestic SEO or Ahrefs. Ahrefs will sample for you for free. Majestic SEO is a monster tool you can use but cost! Just try to do link profile study just to see if there is link spam associated with your website. Just curious!
The only idea here for sudden loss in rankings or links is related to duplicate content, 404s, soft 404s, aka broken links to pages or deleted pages that were once ranked/cached with Google.
Hope this makes sense.
-
We have never had a link building campaign or paid for a single link. Even if they were diluted, wouldn't they still show up in open site?
-
Did many of those pages have duplicate content problems. Do a quick audit on the website using "Screaming Frog". It's free to use and is fast. You can also export csv reports and study in excel. Let me know what you find!
-
find out if they were internal or external you can see that in WMT
if internal it's probably a reflection of different site navigation and number of links on your pages (and number of paged)
if external it's 404'ing links (make sure you are 301'ing everything important) or links getting devalued or dropped by sites. Sometimes a site can be linking to you 200,000 times and then remove your links overnight.
-
Originally they were all 302s, we had that changed to 301s. in mid December. We started to see improvement after that though. We never had anyone attempt to linkbuild though so I have no idea how we even had 118k links, a lot must have been internal. Organic traffic is down quite a bit though so there is some sort of problem.
-
Yea check this too; great answer here. I just don't know why people are doing this without 301 in a .htaccess file to new location. But it's hard to tell if the poster is having problems internally or externally?!
-
These links were probably diluted by the late and famous Google Penguin Algorithm. This algorithm was targeted at websites that have over optimized link building. This including using the same anchor text over and over.
Use Majestic SEO or Ahrefs to look at the link profile.
You can certainly do an audit on your links and determine if you have enough resources to go through a disavow process.
I would focus on instead setting a budge for quality directory submissions using branded keywords and or press releases for new content your website produces.
*Also avoid doing too much link building in a 0 to 90 period. You just don't need as many links anymore!
This should help you move forward.
-
when u changed sites did you 301 redirect all of the old URLs to the new URLs? if not then those links pointing to your site are 404'ing and got dropped.
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
-
Reasonable to Ask URL of Link from SEO Providing New Links before Link Activation?
My firm has hired an SEO to create links to our site. We asked the SEO to provide a list of domains that they are targeting for potential links. The SEO did not agree to this request on the grounds that the list is their unique intellectual property. Alternatively I asked the SEO to provide the URL that will be linking to our site before the link is activated. The SEO did not agree to this. However, they did say we could provide comments afterwards so they could tweak their efforts when the next 4-5 links are obtained next month. The SEO is adamant that the links will not be spam. For whatever it is worth the SEO was highly recommended. I am an end user; the owner and operator of a commercial real estate site, not an SEO or marketing professional. Is this protectiveness over process and data typical of link building providers? I want to be fair with the provider and hope I will be working with them a long time, however I want to ensure I receive high quality links. Should I be concerned? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages
Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Link building - still effective ?
Hi, I know 70-80% of the links on Google have no-follow keyword. What I need to know is if link building by using guest posting and a combination of no-follow links through social media is still effective ? What would you suggest in terms of link building. I have read all the articles on moz and everything, but I need a personal touch on this matter. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kiraftw
Andrei0 -
SEO Effect of Outbound Links
Greetings MOZ community: What is best practices when it comes to creating outbound links to other websites? Will adding such links improve the MOZ domain authority of my site? How many outbound links should be added to each page? For example I run a commercial real estate web site in New York. About 20 pages are written about neighborhoods. If several outbound links are added to each neighborhood page, and these links point to pages that provide further information about that neighborhood, will my neighborhood pages where the links originates from see improved ranking (or ranking potential)? Are these outbound links a critical SEO factor? Thanks everyone!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Should I have as few internal links as possible?
On most pages of my site i have a Quick Links section, which gives x3 cross sales links to other products, a newsletter sign up link, link to Blog, x4 links from images to surveys, newsletters, feedback etc. Will these links be hurting my optimal SEO juice between pages, should the number of internal links be kept to a minimum? My site is www.over50choices.co.uk if that helps. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep1
Ash0 -
Optimisation change caused a drop
We are a web design company and SEO has never been our main thing but we can do it for clients quite well. We were ranking under web design and our location quite well up until 3 months ago. We didn't really have much on our page for web design but targetted website design instead. Our SEO guy who has proved himself for getting some of our clients to the top of Google under very generic search terms recommended we focus on Web Design, so I changed the site accordingly. 2 days later Google has seen our changes and now we've changed our H1 and copy. However, our ranking has dropped 1 place yet again. Obviously I've now panicked and am stressing (even feeling sick) about what to do. He is away until next week so I can't ask him. Could it be that Google has seen we're targetting the word and pushed us down? Shall I wait for the link building he's doing? My own link building lately seems to knock us down a place with every new link I'm doing (and I'm only adding the odd link - not spamming at all). What's odd is that we're still doing extremely well for keywords that aren't even mentioned in our copy at all really. If you could help or offer advice I'd be very grateful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchez19600 -
Measurement of Link Value
Over the past few months I have encountered webmasters who claim to be using instruments far better than open site explorer but they will not disclose what they are. Are there better ways of determining the value of a link than OSE? Is "link juice" more important than page/domain authority where the link resides? Or vice-vesa. Any help understanding this would be appreciated. I do not want to offend other webmasters but I also do not want to be fooled by them either while negotiating a link exchange with them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Footer sitewide links
Here's a question - does having a "website designed by" reference in the footer of every page of one of your clients help or hurt? I have a major university .edu that I designed a site for one of their departments and it is just about to launch and they've allowed me to put a reference in the footer. I've had pretty good luck with this on my other clients' sites, but didn't know if this practice is seen as spammy. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chas-2957210