Drop in the external links

[madedotcom]

Hi,

We notice a sudden drop in our external links over a month (May to June). The numbers have fallen drastically from ~55K to ~28K.The followed linking  root domains has changed from 781 to 776. I am using OSE to download the inbound links data an analyse, however the downloaded csv lists only about 25 links from every domain so I am unable to figure how we have lost the external links over time.

But, the Domain Mozrank has seen a gradual increase. Now I suspect  the reason for the DA of our site to fall from 58 to 57 is mainly because of the external links loss.  Am I right in assuming this?

Is there a way to figure out the lost links?

Please help!

Thanks,

[Cyrus-Shepard]

It's pretty common to see fluctuation like this from one Linkscape index to the next. Also, SEOmoz is constantly working to improve the index, and from time to time changes the way it crawls the web.

Domain Authority is calculated fresh with each new update, and it's a comparative metric based on other sites on the web. This means it's better to compare your DA to your competition with each update, than to compare small fluctuation against yourself from month to month.

To your point about OSE - to improve efficiency, OSE only records the first 25 links for every domain because after the first few links, each additional link makes very little difference in rankings or correlation data.

[madedotcom]

Great, thanks!

[MalcolmGibb]

I found that majesticSEO picked up most of the links from these sources, although you may not find all of them. Export all the data you can if you have majesticSEO, I think aHrefs will also pick this data up.

[madedotcom]

Thanks for the quick reply, Malcolm. That's a relief! The rankings have been more or less consistent.

Is there a way to get a complete list of the links for further analysis?

[MalcolmGibb]

I've noticed a drop in external links for some clients too. I wouldn't worry about it, it is the fallout from Penguin/Panda where Google has devalued certain links. Those 30k links or so that came from 5 domains could have been sitewide blogroll links or footer links of low quality that Google has removed from their index.

I would assume your right about DA, but I wouldn't worry about it that much unless your rankings are seeing a massive shift.