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.
Rankings Dropped After New Backlinks.
-
I have a low-traffic website (under 100 unique visitors per day) and I've encountered a strange issue started yesterday morning. I acquired three back-links, one of these back-links is contextual and the other two are site-wide. The site-wide back-links are from PA 40+ blogs. It looks like the back-links are already indexed by Google.
Despite these new back-links, my rankings across multiple keywords have dropped several positions. I'm new to SEO, but I would assume new back-links would improve my rankings. None of these back-links are low quality links, they are from real established blogs with high domain and page authority values.
Could anyone give me insights into why my rankings may have dropped with new back-links?
-
Hi poke1! If Gaston's replies helped, mind marking one or more as a "Good Answer?" It'll get him some bonus MozPoints, and it's helpful for us.
Otherwise, how can we be of more help?
-
Got it, thank you!
-
The links are new (only 2 or 3 days old) and all of them are DoFollow and all links are from relevant blogs.
In my opinion it's too early to impact that much in rankings.
The site-wide links are branded links (not rich anchor text links), I don't see how branded site-wide links could warrant a penalty.
That's why i've stated that some people believe that it might get you a penalty. It depends. In this case, being branded will cause not harm. You should've said that were branded.
There are many blogs which list their favorite websites on their sidebar, it looks to be common among average bloggers. Should I ask these bloggers to remove the links or should I wait for 2/3 weeks and basically see what happens.
Yeap, let's wait a little longer. And no, in the case that are branded there is harm.
Could it be that Google is just "shuffling" my website around after they noticed new back-links and I am on the downside right now and may rebound? Is this something that happens?
I dont think that this "shuffling" is only related to the backlinks. It may be a reason. There is no garatee that you will remain in the old position, or if you will stay in a different. I'd advise you a little patience. And dont make any major changes so to be able to analyze after.
Best Luck.
GR. -
The links are new (only 2 or 3 days old) and all of them are DoFollow and all links are from relevant blogs.
The site-wide links are branded links (not rich anchor text links), I don't see how branded site-wide links could warrant a penalty.
There are many blogs which list their favorite websites on their sidebar, it looks to be common among average bloggers. Should I ask these bloggers to remove the links or should I wait for 2/3 weeks and basically see what happens.
Could it be that Google is just "shuffling" my website around after they noticed new back-links and I am on the downside right now and may rebound? Is this something that happens?
Thank you for your response.
-
Hi there,
tl;dr; Wait 2 or 3 weeks to make sure that the problem is not caused by the backlinks. I'd worry a lot about those site-wide links.
It's really hard to analyze how much some backlinks have impacted in your SERPs. Even more difficult is to see changes in such short notice. Three things to say here:
- Site-wide links. There are lots of people saying that those asure you to be penalized. My opinion, it depends. You should take special care of your backlink profile It doesn't harm to have some siwte-wide, but it shoudn't be the majority of your links coming from those sources.
- The PA's backlinks. That metric is not thar reliable to ascertain a good/bad impacto in your rankings. There are lots of other analysis to be done. Keep that in mind.
- How did you find out those new backlinks? Dpending on the backlink checker tool, you should check how long have them been there. Also, are them DoFollow?
Remember that rankings may vary for other reasons that yours. It is likely that some of your ranking competitors are gaining strenght or google made some update on the algorithm that is crushing you.
Best of luck.
GR.
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
-
How to get rid of bad backlinks
So I noticed my rankings going down and spam score going up. So under my spam score there are over 100 links for different websites but ALL redirect to semalt.com I researched it and it says they hijacked a bunched of backlinks but don't know much more. How can I get rid of all those backlinks? I was told I could use the disavow tool but apparently that can hurt my ranking as well. The semalt.com site has no backlink to me - it looks like the pages that have/had my backlinks, they've redirected to them. For instance this is one of the links http://www.oxvideos.xyz/indianantyphotoxxx 422005fb-9240-40a4-8b65-f5b1f5079dea-image.png
Link Building | | landlwoof40 -
Ahrefs Backlinks VS Moz Backlinks
HI Team and members We have website related to jobs in Pakistan and we purchased 5 niche edits backlinks to a specific page " MES Jobs 2021" In ahrefs it show only 2 backlinks to that page but in moz 0 backlinks but in actually there are 5 links. Why this happen in moz? We actually love this tool used for Keywords research for jobs in Pakistan find some cool keywords using moz but we facing backlinks issues in it.
Link Building | | AliHassanbinali1 -
How much time does it takes for a backlink to get registered in Google? My basketball anime website has been live since start of this week and Google has not registered any backlink.
So my website https://www.animedhfa.com/basketball-anime/ about basketball Anime has shown no changes in DA or backlinks. It has been 5 days perhaps since it went live.
Link Building | | ahmad74750 -
Backlinks from the Same Domain (But Different Pages)
Wayyy back when (in the days of yore) Mr Cutts spelled out in a video that page rank is distributed equally between the external links on the page. If there are two links on a page, each gets passed 50% of the available page rank etc. (Perhaps an oversimplification but bear with me). As a result of this, the company I worked for at the time (this was the dark ages when sidebar homepage links were in vogue) decreed that we would only ever approach a site about a link for a client once, as additional links had little extra SEO Value. Now you could argue that if there are 5 external links, each acquiring 20% of the power, and your site has 2 of those, you are getting 40% of the power, but lets forget the basic math for a minute. I have scoured the web and Mr Cutts' videos and I cannot find the answer to my question: If my site (Site A) has a backlink from SiteB Page 1, and a backlink from SiteB page 2 - does this count as two separate links in the eyes of Google? If the SAME site links out to my site, linking to different pages in different posts, does this give me more SEO benefit? Thanks for your time!
Link Building | | Turkey0 -
Backlinks from newpapers that requires subscription
Don't know if this has been answered in another post, but what happens to backlinks that requires users to subscribe and/or pay to view the content with the backlink on it?
Link Building | | helgeolaussen
Some newspaper sites has subscription requirement to view certain content.
Does the backlink drop in value? Or is there any negative effect from this?0 -
Do backlinks which contain parameters pass value
For some of our partners, we use our own tracking string in the url i.e. www.mysite.com/landingpage.html?partner=123456 . This has caused backlinks to be created to our site containing the partner string. I was wondering if these links would pass value to www.mysite.com/landingpage.html and the tracking parameters would be ignored or would Google treat www.mysite.com/landingpage.html?partner=123456 as its own page. If it did treat it as a seperate page, could you reclaim some of it using the canoncial tag?
Link Building | | L_F0 -
Frustrated with spammy backlinks from competitors
I've only been doing SEO for my company for the last month and I've made some headway but what is really frustrating me right now is a couple of competitors that have OBVIOUS spammy links ranking in the number 1,2,3 stops all over the board for the keywords i'm going for. One competitor in particular has anchor text links EVERYWHERE that make absolutely no sense...junk like... "I have never been more saddened by anything in my life than when my grandfather got cancer. I told my uncle he needed to buy some auto insurance. I really like pork." I mean, these links are the pages with the most page authority and page rank out of all of the ones they have...and I'd venture to say that almost all of their backlinks are like this...well, half of them are just random links with good anchor text on the sidebar of a bazillion spam websites (diapers, toys, fake blogs, etc.)...while i have about 3k links and most of my top competitors have about 5k links...these guys have over 33k. Worse yet, when I look at something like Alexa rank, they have pretty high overall traffic rank but it shows traffic rank in MX (mexico) instead of the US...these guys only sell in the US! I mean, they're black hat if I've ever seen such a thing and they rank superbly on all keywords. What can I do to compete with this junk?
Link Building | | jgower0 -
Paul and Angela Style Backlinks
Do Forum Profile Links provided by Paul and Angela hold any SEO merit ? Will it help in improving SER?
Link Building | | krishrun0