Drop in Links According to Webmaster Tools

[Professor]

Webmaster tools is telling me the links to my site has dropped by 100,000 links in one month.

Can someone please tell me what may have happened?

[Professor]

I haven't paid for anything - trying to stay white hat right?

But before me could be another story?

You are right, http://www.ahrefs.com states that my linking domains has gone up

thanks for your help again!

[danatanseo]

Good explanation BB. I had to give you a thumbs up for using the word "eviscerating." I love it!

[Brocberry]

That makes sense, good point. Thanks.

[danatanseo]

Did you pay for any featured links in any directories? Or perhaps maybe someone did this prior to you coming on board. I can't say for sure, but this is a very likely scenario. Again, focus more on the number and quality of your linking domains. I have seen fluctuations like this before and they aren't necessarily cause for concern.

For example, I am in house SEO for a company that does audio video installations. For a couple of months our products were picked up and listed in a trade magazine online. This temporarily inflated our links being reported in Webmaster Tools. Here's what that looked like. While this looks like a decrease, the number of linking domains actually has gone up:

<colgroup><col width="68"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
| 4/17/2012 | 20,339 |
| 4/20/2012 | 20,156 |
| 5/1/2012 | 18,812 |
| 5/8/2012 | 17,576 |
| 5/15/2012 | 17,432 |
| 5/29/2012 | 16,280 |
| 6/7/2012 | 13,544 |
| 9/21/2012 |

13,362

|

[danatanseo]

Good question BB. Think about how news stories are published. Say you make page one for something. That news site might have 3 or 4 thousand pages. Say they have links to all the latest headlines on the right hand side of their template and that your news is in that list. As long as you are a headline, boom, you are linked from 3 or 4 thousand pages. As soon as your story is no longer front page, those links from all the pages go away and you retain just the one from the article that remain in their archive. In this scenario, you lost a lot of links, but you didn't lose any linking domains.

That being said, my guess is that you might have lost 100,000 links, but those links were from a small handful of linking root domains. If you lost 100,000 linking domains, that would be truly alarming. I am guessing that's not the case.

Hope that explanation made sense. What were you able to see in Ahrefs?

[Professor]

Of course I din't keep any such list of what the links were. All I have is a tracking sheet to ensure that my "Link Building" campaign was actually happening LOL This is according to Webmaster tools, links to my site:

May - 267,678

Start of Link Building Campaign

June - 290, 664

July - 226, 735

August - 152,009

Sept - 46,512

[Brocberry]

Hi Dana

Why might the links generated by a news story or new product perhaps be less permanent than others?

BB

[Brocberry]

If you're lucky enough to have kept a record of the linking domains, you could search to see if Google has taken some sites out of their index by doing a "site:" search, ie:

site:domain-that-links-to-me.com

and if you get no results, I believe that's because Google has de-indexed them.

If you pay for a lot of content sharing type links, they are likely to be on sites that Google will get round to eviscerating eventually.

What percentage of total links have gone?

[danatanseo]

Any number of things could have happened William. How many links did you have before the drop. Some fluctuations are normal, especially if you released a new product or made it into a news story, your links can skyrocket for a time then settle back down. Or, it could be that you had a lot of links from bad directories that Google has de-indexed (same is true for blog networks, etc.)

Have you tried viewing your link profile in http://www.ahrefs.com ? You might get a better idea of what's going on if you look there. Interested to know what you see there? Hope that helps!

Dana