Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Ahrefs - What Causes a Drastic Loss in Referring Pages?
-
While I was doing research on UK Flower companies I noticed that one particular domain had great rankings (top 3), but has slid quite a bit down to page two. After investigating further I noticed that they had a drastic loss of referring pages, but an increase in total referring domains. See this screenshot from ahrefs.
I took a look at their historical rankings (got them from the original SEO provider's portfolio) and compared it to the Wayback Machine. There did not seem to be any drastic changes in the site structure. My question is what would cause such a dramatic loss in total referring pages while showing a dramatic increase in referring domains? It appears that the SEO company was trying rebound from the loss of links though.
Any thoughts on why this might happen?
-
The Google Disavow tool doesn't work like that. It won't actually remove links from any pages. It is basically just a signal to Google that you want those links to be nofollowed. Ahrefs would have no clue if something has been disavowed or not.
-
Hi,
One thing that comes to mind is using the Disavow tool. The UK Flower company might have used the Disavow tool to remove all the referring pages that they thought were spam.
-
First thing that comes to mind is maybe the site had a lot of site-wide links before. If it had 5,000 or 10,000 links coming from 1 single domain and that website went down, that would be a huge loss of referring pages in a short amount of time. Maybe they were in web directories and asked to be removed? While simultaneously attempting to build some high quality backlinks from more referring pages?
It's all speculation of course, but plausible.
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
-
My website is not configured in AMP pages, but it is mobile-friendly.
Hi
Algorithm Updates | | rayabahadur
My website is not configured in AMP pages, but it is mobile-friendly.
Last month, my website was ranked to 10 positions for this keyword (Magento Development Company).
Sometimes it's showing on 25 positions but not in the top 5 positions. Here is my URL (for analysis):
https://www.nevinainfotech.com/magento-development-service/
Would you please explain why my keyword rankings are often not showing in the search listings?
Would you mind letting me know is there anything I need to change?
Thank0 -
Is it necessary to have unique H1's for pages in a pagination series (i.e. blog)?
A content issue that we're experiencing includes duplicate H1 issues within pages in a pagination series (i.e. blog). Does each separate page within the pagination need a unique H1 tag, or, since each page has unique content (different blog snippets on each page), is it safe to disregard this? Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BopDesign0 -
Does Google ignores page title suffix?
Hi all, It's a common practice giving the "brand name" or "brand name & primary keyword" as suffix on EVERY page title. Well then it's just we are giving "primary keyword" across all pages and we expect "homepage" to rank better for that "primary keyword". Still Google ranks the pages accordingly? How Google handles it? The default suffix with primary keyword across all pages will be ignored or devalued by Google for ranking certain pages? Or by the ranking of website improves for "primary keyword" just because it has been added to all page titles?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Sitemaps for landing pages
Good morning MOZ Community, We've been doing some re-vamping recently on our primary sitemap, and it's currently being reindexed by the search engines. We have also been developing landing pages, both for SEO and SEM. Specifically for SEO, the pages are focused on specific, long-tail search terms for a number of our niche areas of focus. Should I, or do I need to be considering a separate sitemap for these? Everything I have read about sitemaps simply indicates that if a site has over 50 thousand pages or so, then you need to split a sitemap. Do I need to worry about a sitemap for landing pages? Or simply add them to our primary sitemap? Thanks in advance for your insights and advice.
Algorithm Updates | | bwaller0 -
Dates appear before home page description in the SERPs- HUGE drop in rankings
We have been on the first page of Google for a number of years for search terms including 'SEO Agency', 'SEO Agency London' etc. A few months ago we made some changes to the design of the home page (added a blog feed), and made changes to the website sitemap. Two days ago (two months after last site changes were made) we dropped subsantially in the SERPs for all home page keywords. Where we are found, a date appears before the description in the SERPs, dating February 2012 (which is when we launched the original website). The site has been through a revamp since then, yet it still shows 2012. This has been followed by a few additional strange things, including the sitelinks that Google is choosing to show (which including author bio pages showing in homepage site links), and googling our brand name no longer brings up sitelinks in the SERPs. The problem only affects the home page. All other pages are performing as standard. When Penguin 4.0 came out we saw a noted improvement in our SERP performance, and our backlinks are good and quality, largely from PR efforts. Of course, I would be interested in additional pairs of eyes on the back links to see if anyone thinks that I have missed anything! We have 3 of our senior SEOs working on trying to figure out what is going on and how to resolve it, but I would be very interested if anyone has any thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | GoUp3 -
How to find which keywords bring traffic to a particular page on my website ?
I have been using Google Analytics and SEOMoz tools for a while now. I know which are my top landing pages and some of the keywords which bring me traffic. But I don't know which are the top searched keywords for my website as these are "not provided" by Google Analytics. More importantly, I want to know which keywords are directing traffic to a particular page on my website. Can anyone help ?
Algorithm Updates | | EricMoore0 -
Does google index non-public pages ie. members logged in page
hi, I was trying to locate resources on the topics regarding how much the google bot indexes in order to qualify a 'good' site on their engine. For example, our site has many pages that are associated with logged in users and not available to the public until they acquire a login username and password. Although those pages show up in google analytics, they should not be made public in the google index which is what happens. In light of Google trying to qualify a site according to how 'engaged' a user is on the site, I would feel that the activities on those member pages are very important. Can anyone offer suggestions on how Google treats those pages since we are planning to do further SEO optimization of those pages. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | jumpdates0 -
Stop google indexing CDN pages
Just when I thought I'd seen it all, google hits me with another nasty surprise! I have a CDN to deliver images, js and css to visitors around the world. I have no links to static HTML pages on the site, as far as I can tell, but someone else may have - perhaps a scraper site? Google has decided the static pages they were able to access through the CDN have more value than my real pages, and they seem to be slowly replacing my pages in the index with the static pages. Anyone got an idea on how to stop that? Obviously, I have no access to the static area, because it is in the CDN, so there is no way I know of that I can have a robots file there. It could be that I have to trash the CDN and change it to only allow the image directory, and maybe set up a separate CDN subdomain for content that only contains the JS and CSS? Have you seen this problem and beat it? (Of course the next thing is Roger might look at google results and start crawling them too, LOL) P.S. The reason I am not asking this question in the google forums is that others have asked this question many times and nobody at google has bothered to answer, over the past 5 months, and nobody who did try, gave an answer that was remotely useful. So I'm not really hopeful of anyone here having a solution either, but I expect this is my best bet because you guys are always willing to try.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0