External Links Massive Drop

[Optimise]

In Google Webmaster Tools I have well over 1000 links.  Now I appreciate that this will vary a lot compared to Open Site Explorer but that's showing just 45.

Previously, before the last OSE update on the 28th I had 182 links so this is a big drop.  My competitors use similar software (vbulletin forum) and have all increased in links and my actual links haven't dropped at all according to Google Wemaster Tools.)

My MozRank has dropped a lot, as has the authority and trust.  I know this is only a guide but it's very frustrating.  My PageRank has also dissapeared (although was only 1 a month or two ago) so really not sure what's going on.

Does anyone have any ideas.  I haven't done anything that would penalise me in Google, just some tweaking of certain pages to try and help relevance and rankings.

Cheers.

[Optimise]

Thank you very much for all of that info.  Will have a good read and get link building.

[KaneJamison]

OK, got your PM. So the short and sweet version is you need more quality links.

OSE shows 23 linking root domains to your entire domain, which is on par with your current PA/DA (doesn't address the drop of course).

Also, for your homepage I see 456 links from 5 domains. Don't focus on total links, it's a deceptive metric. Focus on Linking Root Domains instead of total links - aside from PA & DA, that is the only other monthly metric I track from OSE.

Go to Google Webmaster Tools into the link section, it says 1000 links, but in the top left section titled "Who Links the Most" click "more" and at the top it will say "Top XXXX domains that link to you". What is that number? I'd guess it's under 100? If so, that's confirming what I said above about getting more quality links and focusing on linking root domains.

When I search google for "yoursitename.co.uk" the mentions I find aren't much better, which tells me there's lots of low quality links (not necessarily created by you) and not enough quality ones to balance it out. That said, I do a site:yourdomain.co.uk search and see over 25k URLs indexed, so Google hasn't abolished you from the SERPs...

I'd recommend reading the following two posts. The first will take you 20 minutes to digest at most. The second link should take you a few years to finish doing, and when you're done you'll be far beyond your competitors.

• Growing Popularity & Links / What is Link Building? - SEOMoz Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 7
• Complete List of Link Building Strategies - Point Blank SEO

Focus on delivering quality to your audience and interacting with other forums and sites as often as possible to draw people in, and you'll stick out from the competition.

[Optimise]

Thank you very much for the advice, really appreciate it.  I've sent you a pm with the web address.

Cheers.

[KaneJamison]

A 45 to 1000 ratio is fairly low. Rand recently said that they see an average of 40% at the lowest for sites they've compared. For the sites I manage, 25% to 50% is most common.

To me, a ratio that low suggests that they're crappy links, since crappy links typically don't get picked up by OSE, but they're frequently reported by GWT.

If links are no longer showing up on OSE, I'd guess it's because:

1. they links have been removed from the sites they were on,
2. the links are no longer reachable by the index (in other words they've been pushed deeper into a site and they don't end up getting crawled),
3. or they're low-quality links.

The software you use shouldn't affect link counts that are reported, unless perhaps you just changed a ton of URLs, but then your Top Pages tab would show lots of 404s - you wouldn't see the links missing.

Pagerank went through a toolbar update in the last two months, which could explain that drop.

Hard to give any other suggestions without more details. If the URL isn't confidential, I could probably diagnose more specifically than that.