Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Sudden drop in external links... why?
-
We had a lot of external links (2.5K, which was good compared to our competition), but in the last few weeks, it dropped 1.1K. I obviously did something wrong. What are the causes of such a dramatic drop like that?
Questions, suggestions, ideas, anything is welcome at this point.
Thanks!
-
Hi Brandon,
It looks like you've changed the original question...
The original question was to do with a drop in the number of internal links. Are you sure it's external links you are talking about?
Cheers,
David
-
Hi David,
Thanks for the reply. Yes, we did update the header and footer. I'm curious – why would that cause me to loose that many backlinks?
I didn't loose any points in my DA score nor drop in my keyword rankings, so that's a good thing. But loosing 1.1K backlinks is never a good thing to see.
Thanks!
Brandon -
Hi Brandon,
Sounds like you might've updated the site template and removed some sitewide links to partner sites or social profiles.
Have you made any template changes (or header/footer changes) recently?
And just FYI, more external links doesn't mean you are doing better than your competition and the drop in external links doesn't necessarily mean you've done something wrong.
Cheers,
David
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
-
Does an external link to an image file on my site help my SEO?
I found a few websites that are displaying images from my site. Curiously, they have also linked these images to the source image file on my website. I found these because Moz showed these sites in my list of backlinks. I assume that means it impacts my Domain Authority. But does this actually help me in search engines since it's not linking to a page on my site?
Link Building | | AlexLenhoff0 -
Sudden drop in trust flow
Hi there, we've noticed a sudden drop in both trust and citation flow scores for many of our clients' websites. We haven't done any black hat activities nor done anything differently the last few months that we can think have contributed to this. We have however noticed a backlink from a website: http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/archives.html that has appeared across all the websites which have dropped in rankings. Could this link be the contributing factor & would that mean someone has linked it to our clients' websites?
Link Building | | Alexanders0 -
RSS feed links
Is this an RSS feed link? How was this page generated? http://blog.moregoodfoundation.org/category/technology/feed What causes it to show up as a backlink in open site explorer? And how would you go about removing these links? Lots of questions there 🙂 Thank you.
Link Building | | ThridHour0 -
Do footer links pass less link juice?
One of my best inbound links for PA and DA happens to be a footer link, curious if it's less valuable or has any value at all.
Link Building | | Theskimonster0 -
Link Exchange
Hi everyone, I just started working for a client in a new niche. After reviewing the backlink profiles of his competitors I can see that the top sites are using a ton of link exchanges. They are from really spammy sites too. The kind that will link to anyone that provides a link back. Anyone else seeing much of this?
Link Building | | SixTwoInteractive0 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
Link Removal Services
I have seen a number of these services pop up over the past few months. My question is, has anyone used them, and did you see any results? Here is a few example of the ones I have seen appear recently http://www.removeem.com/ http://www.linkremovalservices.com/ http://deletebacklinks.com/ http://www.linkdelete.com/
Link Building | | EwanFisher0 -
Changing links
Hi guys i wanted you views on changing the anchor text of links. I have quality links coming in but with year terms such as 2012 in there, if i want to change them all to 2013 for example would it be badly seen by Google? I cant say i feel comfortable about doing it but they are my links and are related to our products. Any advice much appreciated.
Link Building | | pauledwards0