What could have caused Total links to drop from 860,000 to 93,127 in Open Site Explorer?
-
I've been monitoring root domain total links for a website over the past couple of months and recently noticed a significant drop at the beginning of July.Specifically, I have been tracking the total links for the root domain using open site explorer. Since April the total number or links has been fluctuating among 860,000 - 865,000. However at the beginning of July, they dropped to 93,127 and now sit only at 110,831.This is a very significant and troubling decrease and I am wondering what the cause could be? Did Moz change the way they report/determine the total link metrics? It is especially baffling since neither total internal nor total external links have seen significant decreases.
-
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out! My name is Erin, and I'm on the Moz Help Team. This is a tricky thing to troubleshoot since we don't have a historical database for our Index, and to my knowledge we haven't changed anything about the way we gather/report this information. Sorry I can't do more for you on the support side with this one! While I can tell you how we gather the data, ideas as to why a drop like this would occur is outside of my scope of expertise.
Presashop might have a good starting point for your investigation though! I'll leave this questions as "unanswered" on my side so more folks from the community can chime in if they have any other insights.
Good Luck, and Happy Tuesday!
Erin
-
Do you remember any of the sites / pages that were being linked to? Are they still there? It could be a natural thing, or it could be an index issue with Moz. Once I had posted a comment on a site and it was considered a top comment, so they kept it in the side bar of their site for like 2 months. Their site had like 30k pages. You might be having an issue like that. Is the number of linking domains down also by a lot, or is it just the number of links? Because a site could have re-factored how they do things in relation to duplicate content, then when Moz crawled it, it is not picking up all of the links from the 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
-
Links in link lists not being discovered by Moz
I uploaded a couple of link lists to Moz about a week ago and have been tracking them. Most of the links on the list are from significant 90+ DA domains such as Wikipedia, Medium, etc. So far, Moz only seems to have discovered about 4 the 200 or so links I loaded. Do we know how long it takes for these to be discovered by Moz? Quite new to this, so any help understanding timelines for this would be appreciated.
Link Explorer | | RobertPhillips180 -
Crawling and Links - Showing Links
Hello I have a campaign in Moz that shows a new site as having no domain authority and no links. The site does have links to it, but they don't show up on OSE. Does Moz count links in the comments section of blogs (or is this counted as social, when the commenting system is one that requires facebook login?) I know blog comments are not great for SEO, I just use them when the post/link is 100% genuinely relevant. The site does have actual links on websites not just comment links, so it isn't showing any type of link. What is the best way to see the links the site has? Thanks!
Link Explorer | | wearehappymedia1 -
How to interpret a possible spam link?
Hallo, Spam analysis is suggesting that my website may have a spam problem (score is 5). When I analyse the single spam links, I am puzzled. the links to my site are actually links in disqus comments I wrote myself on the linking site, in order to aswer REAL question of real people giving them honest and useful answers (and linking my site :-), like the link pointed out in the attached image, also pasted herebelow: http://www.androidiani.com/news/servizi-premium-indesiderati-lantitrust-contro-tim-vodafone-wind-e-3-213235 Most links have this same nature. Has this behaviour (which I consider natural, in good faith) been regarded as spammy? Should avoid linking my site in the comments I write on external sites? the links from comunicatistampagratis.it (towards the end of the list) are from a free press release website: you send them the press release, they publish it. Should I avoid using this free press release site? Should I avoid using any free press release site at all (since they are regarded as spammy)? is there a rule to learn (since apparently I have not been very good so far at using my good faith to separate good links from spammy links) whether a link can be spammy and therefore try and avoid it? thank you for you help.
Link Explorer | | micvitale0 -
Why isn't OSE showing any of my links?
My domain uses a redirect of all traffic to https. The site is https://www.tallslimtees.com. I've been working on it this year and know there are several good, topical links coming in. But OSE shows nothing. Any idea why this would be the case? How can I see all of my links and the data on them?
Link Explorer | | DanDeceuster0 -
No incoming links from DMOZ in my report
Hi, I am confused, after so much years of waiting, some months ago I got listed in the DMOZ http://www.dmoz.org/World/Español/Tiempo_libre/Turismo/Blogs/ (My blog is Charcotrip) The problem is that when I check the incoming list in the MOZ report, the DMOZ link is totally absent, I don't get it. Does anyone knows why can this happening? (is not that my blog get recently listed, now it has been there for a while). Thanks!
Link Explorer | | Gaolga0 -
Why is the company reference of "designed by" with a link back my web development site not being indexed as a link?
Using the Mozbar I am analyzing my links and my competitors links. I am noticing other web developer sites are getting credit/index links from all their client's websites with the "designed by...." link in the footer. However, for me I only see one "inbound link" in the link analysis report. Sometimes I notice a company getting several inbound links on one site they built. I have built many other sites and have my company link below on all the footers. Why are the other sites not showing up as "inbound links" on the link analysis report? Thanks for your help! Nikki
Link Explorer | | NikkiPatt0 -
Site Mark-up is Abnormally Small
My site www.brightonsoundsystem.co.uk has been optimised for speed so I have minimised the code needed. Now if I put it through the OSE spam analysis it has a flag for "Site Mark-up is Abnormally Small". What ratio of visible text compared to mark-up code is being used to trigger this flag. Also as this is the only flag I have is ti worth the time fixing.
Link Explorer | | Brighton-Soundsystem0 -
Repeated mysterious 404's from ancient site structure killing my rankings
Several years ago I changed my site structure to go from a flash based site to a blog based wordpress site. After doing so I went from page 1 to page 30 for my relevant search terms. I have employed people to help me track down the problem and I believe that they have narroed it to the existance of 404's being created from some unknown internal source. I have been for years getting links like this... <colgroup><col width="792"></colgroup>
Link Explorer | | dfphotographer.com
| http://www.dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/10/brisbane-wedding-photographer-charisma-and-steve-victoria-park-brisbane/?share=facebook http://www.dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/10/brisbane-wedding-photographer-charisma-and-steve-victoria-park-brisbane/charisma-and-steve-301/?share=email http://www.dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/10/brisbane-wedding-photographer-charisma-and-steve-victoria-park-brisbane/photography-brisbane-04-2/?share=email http://www.dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/10/brisbane-wedding-photographer-charisma-and-steve-victoria-park-brisbane/photography-brisbane-12-2/ http://www.dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/10/brisbane-wedding-photographer-charisma-and-steve-victoria-park-brisbane/photography-brisbane-13-2/ http://www.dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/10/brisbane-wedding-photographer-charisma-and-steve-victoria-park-brisbane/photography-brisbane-13-2/?share=facebook http://www.dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/10/brisbane-wedding-photographer-charisma-and-steve-victoria-park-brisbane/photography-brisbane-13-2/feed/ http://www.dfphotographer.com.au/brisbaneweddingphotographer/2011/10/brisbane-wedding-photographer-charisma-and-steve-victoria-park-brisbane/photography-brisbane-16-2/?share=email | ......regularly showing in webmaster tools, (this is from a top pages report from MOZ where there are hundreds also shown). When I do a moz crawl of the site, none of these links show up. Therefore I have no way of finding the source of these links (they also do not show me the source in WMT as they should). We have completely cleared the site and rebuilt it and although it is still only a couple of weeks in it still does not appear to have stopped them. Does anyone have any way of helping me find the source of these mysterious 404's?0