Why have I lost 1/3 of my backlinks (about 5,000) in 3 months?

[matt-14567]

In August, my client's site (I work at a marketing agency) had about 15,000 backlinks. Now they suddenly have about 10,000 backlinks. And their Domain Authority has dropped from 48 to 40!

Can someone please help me understand what could've happened?

At first I assumed this had something to do with the latest Penguin update, since I knew my client's site had some extremely spammy backlinks they hadn't cleaned up yet. (The site was hacked at some point and hidden pages were created as part of some kind of link-building scheme, and there were lots of links from sketchy sites to those pages. The hidden pages have been taken down and the URLs now redirect to my client's home page.) But that would only explain a sudden drop in Domain Authority, right? How could Penguin suddenly cause my client to lose 5,000 backlinks? And if it's not Penguin, what could it be?

Thanks in advance for any insight that anyone can share!

[MattRoney]

It's entirely possible that indexation issues are contributing to what you're seeing, Matt. I'd also suggest reading through this Q&A thread by Rand:

https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

[seoman10]

Mello Matt,

If it was my site I would seriously consider getting rid of any redirects from old dodgy pages, you could force Google to consider for the content still exists.  If it goes to a 404 Google can then see clearly it no longer exists.
But would be interesting on what others have to say on that.

I would source my back links mainly from Google search console.

Hope that helps.

[Brian_Dowd]

Hey Matt,

Our site saw a massive up tick in links and then an even larger drop in links from one index to the next. Read this post below from Moz about their last index and about their not-so-great indexing over the last year. That might give you the answer you are looking for.

https://moz.com/blog/mozscape-index-2015?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonv6TOZKXonjHpfsX56u4kXaK2gIkz2EFye%2BLIHETpodcMTctqNL%2FYDBceEJhqyQJxPr3CLtcNwMR4RhHmDA%3D%3D

I can't remember everything in the article, so rather than try to explain it myself, I'll let them do it for me. Hope that helps.

[matt-14567]

Thanks for the response! And thanks for the advice – I'll definitely look into all those steps.

The redirects from the hacked pages are occurring automatically somehow. I guess that must've been set up by the agency that redesigned the client's website last year. They must've specified 301s for certain key pages and had all other old URLs redirect to the home page.

To answer your question, I'm using Moz for backlink analysis. Could their update be the reason I'm seeing such a drop?

BTW – Search Console shows no notifications that would relate to this issue, and no manual penalties...

[seoman10]

Sorry just a question, where are you getting your back links list from? It's not unknown for tools to be inaccurate.

Another point I forgot to mention, Moz did update their index in the past few days, lots of people have seen a DA drop.

[seoman10]

Firstly, sounds like you do have a penalty of some sort.

Secondly, I would not have redirected the hacked pages back to the site anywhere, you could give yourself a penalty that way. You could be passing bad authority or worse from anywhere else on the web, completely out of your control.

Thirdly, don't discount the potential of a website problem. Broken script, user damage, another hack etc

1. Do a thorough link cleanup.

2. Consider taking down any pages that are not relevant or earning any value.

3. Check search console for any notifications or manual penalties.

4. Check the website for performance and functionality.