What would cause a huge decrease in total links?
-
After the latest crawl of one of my client campaigns in Moz, I noticed that their domain authority dropped by 3 since the last crawl just one week ago. That seems pretty drastic. I took a look around to see what might have been the cause, and in looking at the Links > Competitive Metrics > History section of Moz, I found that the site had a decrease of total links from 5,339 to 1,072 (see image) - also a drastic decrease. My question is, what would cause such a huge, sudden decrease in links over just the course of one month? I haven't changed anything up with the approach to their online strategy, in fact we have put increased emphasis on the creation of natural links so this huge decrease comes as a real surprise. I should also mention that Total External Links also decreased, but only from 243 to 205. Any insight into these numbers and what could have possibly caused such a drastic decrease would be very much appreciated!
-
Thanks for the great input. I think we have figured out the issue, at least partially. This particular client had a Google+ page that they had kept up for several years - lots of posts with links back to the website. That G+ page was deleted this past week, which would explain the sudden disappearance of links. I doubt the page was accountable for 4,000+ links, but I'm pretty confident that is where the majority of the decrease came from. Thanks for the help!
-
Shot in the dark but maybe a sitewide link was removed? e.g. you posted a comment on a blog, it appeared in the sidebar under "recent comments", moz picked them up, your comment is no longer recent, lose all the sitewide backlinks, see that drop.
If you've exported your backlinks previously when you had a lot, compare the current links to the old list and see where they differ.
-
Hmm, that does seem a bit drastic!
Have you tried checking your links using another tool other than Moz? Maybe on the last Moz scan there was some sort of hiccup? Try checking your link using: https://ahrefs.com
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
-
Multilingual Sitewide Links
Multilingual links in the footer section is being counted as backlink and we are getting tons of backlinks from all the 7 lingual websites. Is there a solution where we eliminate these links and still having the option to navigate to other lingual pages? vr24NAv
Technical SEO | | comfortclick0 -
301 and 302 for same link
Just trying to find out if this may be the root of a slight traffic dip and also if we should be redirecting differently. We relaunched and did 301 redirects to the new site, initially. Then, we decided to change from http to https. Our HTTP status now looks like this when using the MozBar: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently – http://site.com/oldurl
Technical SEO | | MichaelEka
HTTP/1.1 302 Found – https://site.com/oldurl
HTTP/1.1 200 OK - https://site.com/new Should we be changing that 302 to a 301? Are we losing link equity due to this? Thanks.0 -
How to set up internal linking with subcategories?
I'm building a new website and am setting up internal link structure with subcategories and hoping to do so with best Seo practices in mind. When linking to a subcategory's main page, would I make the internal link www.xxx.com/fishing/ or www.xxx.com/fishing/index.html or does it matter? I'm just trying to avoid duplicate content I guess, if Google saw each page as a separate page. Any other cautions when using subdirectories in my navigation?
Technical SEO | | wplodge0 -
Should I nofollow Geo-located links on a site?
I run various sites that use Geo-location to place related links in navigation menus on a page. For example, if you land on the home page, we will see that you are in Florida and then in one of the content boxes on the page, show job listings that this site has in Florida. We also give the option to search for other jobs or use other navigation options. The idea is to try to help the user along the best we can, but ..... What opinions do persons have here on if these links should be nofollowed as GoogleBot will always see links to places in California etc. - wherever Googlebot is crawling from? Would this then be confusing as we are a site that focused on the entire US and not just California etc Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
Finding Broken Back Links
Hello there I am new here but really want to mend my broken website by myself as I enjoy a challenge! I used to have great rankings but have moved websites a few times (same domain) and the last move was to wordpress. I now have loads of broken links in the SERPS and wondered if there was an easy way to flush google of them as they are getting lots of 404 errors? They really are too many to do a 301 on (I have done the main pages) Also how do I do a crawl of my website for any internal broken links? Does SEOmoz have something or is there an external program you would recommend? Thanks Victoria
Technical SEO | | vcasebourne0 -
Unnatural links in webmaster tools
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to my site.I download latest link from google webmaster tool and decided to remove links from last four months.I also got several links from directory sites and i want to remove the links, how to delete links from directory sites ? I f there is no way to delete directory link , please let me know other option to get rid of this issue.
Technical SEO | | Alick3000 -
Bad back links
Hi Folks I seem to have approx 587 back links to my homepage from this site kitchendetailsanddesign.com since my entire site has under a 1000 back links; I wonder if I should be worried? I've tried contacting the webmaster to remove them but no luck any tips 🙂
Technical SEO | | PHDAustralia680 -
How is link juice passed to links that appear more than once on a given page?
For the sake of simplicity, let's say Page X has 100 links on it, and it has 100 points of link juice. Each page being linked to would essentially get 1 point of link juice. Right? Now let's say Page X links to Page Y 3 times and Page Z 5 times, and every other link only once. Does this mean that Page Y would get 3 "link juice points" and Page Z would get 5? Note: I know that the situation is much more complex than this, such as the devaluation of footer links, etc, etc, etc. However, I am interested to hear peoples take on the above scenario, assuming all else is equal.
Technical SEO | | bheard0