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
-
Do orphan pages take away link juice?
Hi, Just wondering about this whether the orphan pages take away any link juice? We been creating lot of them these days only to link from external sites as landing pages on our site. So, not linking from any part of our website; just linking from other websites. Also, will they get any link juice if they are linked from our own blog-post? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Log-in page ranking instead of homepage due to high traffic on login page! How to avoid?
Hi all, Our log-in page is ranking in SERP instead of homepage and some times both pages rank for the primary keyword we targeted. We have even dropped. I am looking for a solution for this. Three points here to consider is: Our log-in page is the most visited page and landing page on the website. Even there is the primary keyword in this page or not; same scenario continues Log-in page is the first link bots touch when they crawling any page of our website as log-in page is linked on top navigation menu If we move login page to sub-domain, will it works? I am worrying that we loose so much traffic to our website which will be taken away from log-in page sub domain Please guide with your valuable suggestions. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Why different pages rank in different countries?
Hi all, I have been investigating on why our log-in page is ranking for primary keyword, but not our homepage. I can see now homepage is ranking from our second important country. I wonder why and what causes to rank different pages in different countries for same keyword. Again the statistics does not vary much between these countries. Thnaks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Have AMP pages on Chrome disappeared?
Hi, We amplified our site the other day and Google was quick to find our AMP pages. Today, we can´t seem to find any AMP pages on Chrome and it looks like we can´t find any other pages from sites like Wapo and so forth. They´re still visible on Safari. We are searching from Iceland. Is anyone experiencing this and if so, could you please share a link to the news? Thanks and have a nice day!
Algorithm Updates | | guidetoiceland0 -
US domain pages showing up in Google UK SERP
Hi, Our website which was predominantly for UK market was setup with a .com extension and only two years ago other domains were added - US (.us) , IE (.ie), EU (.eu) & AU (.com.au) Last year in July, we noticed that few .us domain urls were showing up in UK SERPs and we realized the sitemap for .us site was incorrectly referring to UK (.com) so we corrected that and the .us domain urls stopped appearing in the SERP. Not sure if this actually fixed the issue or was such coincidental. However in last couple of weeks more than 3 .us domain urls are showing for each brand search made on Google UK and sometimes it replaces the .com results all together. I have double checked the PA for US pages, they are far below the UK ones. Has anyone noticed similar behaviour &/or could anyone please help me troubleshoot this issue? Thanks in advance, R
Algorithm Updates | | RaksG0 -
Can a page be 100% topically relevant to a search query?
Today's YouMoz post, Accidental SEO Tests: When On-Page Optimization Ceases to Matter, explores the theory that there is an on-page optimization saturation point, "beyond which further on-page optimization no longer improves your ability to rank" for the keywords/keyword topics you are targeting. In other words, you can optimize your page for search to the point that it is 100% topically relevant to query and intent. Do you believe there exists such a thing as a page that is 100% topically relevant? What are your thoughts regarding there being an on-page optimization saturation point, beyond which further on-page optimization no longer improves your ability to rank? Let's discuss!
Algorithm Updates | | Christy-Correll1 -
How do I rank multiple pages for my busness/domain name?
When someone searches for our business's name (which is also the domain name) we have one listing (with sitelinks) at the top - however I would also like to rank 2nd, 3rd and 4th for this term. Any suggestions on how this might be done? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | CaBStudios0 -
Should I block non-informative pages from Google's index?
Our site has about 1000 pages indexed, and the vast majority of them are not useful, and/or contain little content. Some of these are: -Galleries
Algorithm Updates | | UnderRugSwept
-Pages of images with no text except for navigation
-Popup windows that contain further information about something but contain no navigation, and sometimes only a couple sentences My question is whether or not I should put a noindex in the meta tags. I think it would be good because the ratio of quality to low quality pages right now is not good at all. I am apprehensive because if I'm blocking more than half my site from Google, won't Google see that as a suspicious or bad practice?1