Drop in Links According to Webmaster Tools
-
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?
-
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!
-
Good explanation BB. I had to give you a thumbs up for using the word "eviscerating." I love it!
-
That makes sense, good point. Thanks.
-
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
|
-
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?
-
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
-
Hi Dana
Why might the links generated by a news story or new product perhaps be less permanent than others?
BB
-
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?
-
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
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
-
Link Building
I have a question as competitor made backlinks on longtail keywords and just for one specific post, If I wanna rank in Google SERP, then should I have to do the same strategy as my competitor did. or can I use just my own keywords to get rank?
Link Building | | aamirmurtaza670 -
Reciprocol Links
Am I correct in stating that linking to every article about your company is a bad idea. I see a lot of sites with followed links to the articles that link to them. Is this not devaluing the link? I've been recommending removing the links or no indexing the page and no following the links. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Link Building | | brandonschultz0 -
Deleting links
I've got 280 links on my wordpress blog site, apparently it's recommended to keep under 100 links. How would I know which links to get rid of and which links to keep?
Link Building | | gimes0 -
"Activating" Links - Do External Links Have to Be Clicked On to Really Have Value?
I heard an SEO talk about the concept of "activating" a link - meaning that if an external link to your site exists, but google doesn't detect that it has gotten any actual clicks, they will significantly discount or ignore the value of the link. Obviously between Chrome, toolbars, and GA, google does have a lot of ways to detect whether a link has gotten clicks. What is the SEOmoz take on this issue?
Link Building | | kbrake0 -
No internal followed links
My site shows no internal followed links in OSE, but each page on my site has internal links, including to the domain itself - jonnyt.me. Any idea why this might be and how I could fix it?
Link Building | | jontarbuck0 -
Outbound links
Hi there, i know inbound links are what hold the main value in terms of link building but if i have an inbound link from a big company such as ITV or BBC and they have put an article on their site linking back to mine, would it be beneficial if i made a comment on my site and then link back to their article or will this not really help? Sorry as you can tell im very new to seo! thanks anthony
Link Building | | anthonybriant0 -
Total Links vs Ext. Followed Links
Hi I'm fairly new to SEO and SEOMOZ. I've created a campaign for my own site and I've added 3 competitor sites. There are 1,385 total links to my site and a massive 49,450 links to one of my competitor's site. However under "Ext. Followed Links", there are 1,045 to my site and only 911 to the same competitor site. Am I correct that it is the "Ext. Followed Links" which are more important from an SEO point of view as the other links have the "no follow" attribute set? Or have I got this wrong? Thanks James
Link Building | | avecsys0 -
Why does opensiteexplorer tell me I have 292 linking domains and google webmasteer tools says 528?
Does anyone have any idea why opensiteexplorer has a specific number of linking domains while google webmaster tools say another? I understand opensiteexplorer needs to update itself, but I have seen this discrepancy for months! Any ideas?
Link Building | | eric_since1910.com0