Links (external and total) have significantly decreased in 1 month from August to October - why?
-
Greetings,
After comparing a few stats in one of my campaigns, I noticed that External Followed Links, Total External Links, and Total Links significantly decreased from August 29th to when I just checked them a few days ago (October 3).
Any ideas on why this happened?
For example, Total External Links went from 50,589 to 39,203.
Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Jenny
-
I'm still trying to get access to GWT for this client, so will definitely check that out. Good call and thanks!!
-
Kyle,
Thanks again for the ongoing help and information - you rock! Our domain authority stayed the same. I'll definitely check out the links to the resources you provided as well. Thanks again!
Jenny
-
Jenny, here is a full list of post were rand and other SEOMoz associates talk about the updates to the mozscape index (which powers OSE and the pro tools):
http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=mozscape+update%3A
In regards to your question of what is mozscape here is another great resource:
http://www.seomoz.org/help/what-is-mozscape
In regards to your last question, it sounds like it was a blend of you losing some links and the mozscape fluctuations. Always take OSE data with a grain of salt, that information is simply to give you insight to trends in your link profile. Did your domain authority drop or stay the same during the changes?
- Kyle
-
Yeah this is the first thing you should do. WMT should give you a more exact number of links than OSE, and those numbers don't tend to fluctuate as much - unless there is an actual loss/gain of a larger number of links/LRDs.
-
Can't believe I didn't think of this earlier, but are you comparing the numbers you're getting here to the numbers you're getting from Google Webmaster Tools? Did you also see a drop in backlinks there?
-
I just learned about vlookup this year. Super useful for cross-referencing spreadsheets.
Here's how it works. In the same Excel document, you will have two sheets. The first one will have all the data from your last OSE report, the one with 50K links. (I'm assuming you exported this.) The second sheet will have all the data from your more recent OSE report, the one with 30k links. The vlookup function will quickly check if something on the first sheet is also on the second sheet.
If it's on the first sheet but not on the second sheet, then that's one of the links that "disappeared." Look those over, check for patterns, test some of them. Maybe you had a sitewide link on a giant website, and that website just went down. But if the missing links are still online, then OSE simply didn't crawl them this time.
If you've never used vlookup before, it's worth spending a few hours reading tutorials, watching videos (tons on YouTube!), and learning the syntax. Best of luck!
-
I'm not familiar with the vlookup function. Is it pretty difficult? I'm pretty good at research and picking things up though so if that's the way to go about it I can give it a go.
Thanks so much for your ongoing assistance.
Jenny
-
How comfortable are you with Excel? Do you know how to use the vlookup function?
-
Forgive this newbie response, but how do I check to see which URLs have disappeared? There are over 10,000 Total External Links which disappeared so let me know if there's an easy way to do this please.
-
Hmm, interesting. I'm new to the pro tool so please forgive this question - but what exactly is the mozscape index and why does it fluctuate?
One competitor went down slightly and another went up, so it seems specific to only our site. So does that indicate a mozscape index fluctuation or something different?
Thanks so much for your help!
-
Have you checked the disappearing URLs to see if they're still online?
-
Keep in mind if you are pulling these stats from OSE or the pro tool that the amount of domains and URLs differ each time they update the mozscape index. So the total amounts may change depending on the variations from those two months.
Have you noticed this change with your competitors sites as well or is it specific to only our site?
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
-
Spam links with high DA
I'm running through the spam analysis and noticed a few links that are considered to be 9+ on the spam score (high spam level), but some of them have DA of 60 -75. How can this be possible? When I view the sites they appear to be be pretty low quality. If i'm considering disavowing a site should I focus on spam score or DA? A DA of 75 is a pretty reputable standing.
Moz Pro | | STP_SEO0 -
Count of Inbound Internal Links
Is there a simple way, using the moz tools, to get a count of inbound internal links for a given URL? Seems simple enough but I'm having trouble finding that specific data point.
Moz Pro | | tvfoodmaps0 -
Google Inbound Links much higher than SEOMOZ
I just started here and really like everything the community and tools so far. One question. My SEOMOZ dashboard shows only one inbound link while Google Web Tools shows 300+. My site has been up for 3 months now and I'm curious about the lack of indexing. Any help, tips or feedback is greatly appreciated. http://CrossTrainingandFitness.com Robb Jarrett
Moz Pro | | carbbon0 -
My competitive link analysis hasn't been updated in nearly 2 months, why?
Anyone else having this problem? My last update was 2/28 and I'm not sure why it hasn't updated since then. Went through all of the documentation to no avail.
Moz Pro | | syount0 -
Find pages containing broken links.
hi everyone, for each internal broken links I need to find all the pages that contain it. In the Seomoz report there is only a refferer link for each broken link, but google webmaster tools indicates that the dead link is present in many pages of the site. there is a way to have these data with SEOmoz or other software, in a csv report ? thanks
Moz Pro | | wwmind0 -
Keyword tool: SEOMOZ spacific month ? vs adword tool 12 month average but same data ???
Running a keyword analysis in SEOMOZ it shows my the folowing information "Local Search Volume (Dec)". I compared the data for the specific country , language and keyword with the adwords keyword tool and it exactly showed me the same numbers. The adwords keyword tool shows: "Local Monthly Searches: This column shows the approximate 12-month average number of search terms matching each keyword" http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=25148 So if the numbers are the same in google keword tool and SEOMOZ why is SEOMOZ saying that for a specif month? If the data is the same one of both can not be right or probaly I didn't get the point. See screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/GyaaW7EkwV Thanks for help
Moz Pro | | n-media0 -
Broken Links and Duplicate Content Errors?
Hello everybody, I’m new to SEOmoz and I have a few quick questions regarding my error reports: In the past, I have used IIS as a tool to uncover broken links and it has revealed a large amount of varying types of "broken links" on our sites. For example, some of them were links on my site that went to external sites that were no longer available, others were missing images in my CSS and JS files. According to my campaign in SEOmoz, however, my site has zero broken links (4XX). Can anyone tell me why the IIS errors don’t show up in my SEOmoz report, and which of these two reports I should really be concerned about (for SEO purposes)? 2. Also in the "errors" section, I have many duplicate page titles and duplicate page content errors. Many of these "duplicate" content reports are actually showing the same page more than once. For example, the report says that "http://www.cylc.org/" has the same content as "http://www.cylc.org/index.cfm" and that, of course, is because they are the same page. What is the best practice for handling these duplicate errors--can anyone recommend an easy fix for this?
Moz Pro | | EnvisionEMI0 -
Significant Benefits from KW Usage
We're wondering how important it is to use a keyword at least 4 times versus say 2. Often times we use our keywords once or twice within the body of our pages with appropriate H1 and Alt text use. Will we notice significant SEO benefits by using the KW at least 4 times given that we are scoring 'A's on almost all our pages via the On-Page Keyword Optimization Tool? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | alltreatment0