Link Activity to site keeps decreasing
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Recently I have started seeing daily declines in the total inbound links to my site. 4 of my top 5 sources are all experiencing pretty significant declines and in fact, Pinterest has declined from a high of 16,295 links in Nov '15 to a current number that is 8,479 on 1/6/16. Any ideas on what could be causing these declines? I did upload a new sitemap in Nov, could this be the cause?
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Hi Charles,
While it's hard to pin point a cause without looking at your particular site, here are a few steps I'd suggest taking.
1 - Monitor your links over time using tools such as Moz Open Site Explorer, Majestic or AHREFs and try to pin point which particular links are dropping off. This will help narrow down the problem and see if it's a real problem or not. For example, I wouldn't expect a drop in Pinterest to be a huge issues from a link perspective (links from there are nofollowed) but it may be an issue if you get a lot of traffic from there. You can also regularly download links from Google Search Console and compare the reports to see which links has gone.
If most of the tools don't show a drop, then it's not as likely to be a big problem but if all of them are reporting drops, then you should take a closer look.
2 - Look at your referral traffic too. Leading on from the previous point, if you're also losing real traffic from referrals, then it's more of a cause for concern because if a link is sending good traffic, then it's a link you don't want to lose.
I hope that helps!
Paddy
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Ok, first of all - far not the best tool to monitor backlinks. They have very long cache time, so a lot of backlinks, which do not exist anymore, could (would) show. So, one of the reasons that you see drop in backlinks amount might be that google cleaned (deleted dead links) your website's backlink profile.
I'd recommend checking your backlink profile in ahrefs or majestic to see historical behaviour, if the tendency is still the same - then you got some problems with backlink quality. Meaning that the backlinks to your website were not worth keeping and they gotta deleted by moderators or something.
Basically, the question is if it's just tools saying that backlinks got deleted or they were deleted in fact.
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Correction, Google Webmaster
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Google Analytics
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Which tool are you using to check backlink amount?
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