What would be causing our linking domains and inbound links to decline?

[amanda_feagle]

I am noticing a decline in the number of our linking domains and inbound links from month to month. It isn't drastic but looking like a trend. Any reason why this would happen? I'm not sure where to start. Thanks!

[MrWhippy]

A tool like MOZ or SEMRush will show you where the backlinks were pointing or you may notice a difference in the page rank or traffic to a page if it lost a valuable link.

If the links all look to be of low quality I wouldnt worry to much if you have a good overall link profile. But I would keep monitoring to make sure it is not a trend that is going to continue.

https://blog.pagezii.com/how-to-check-backlinks-in-google-analytics/

The above link may also help. You may need to add a secondary dimension of landing page. Sorry brain not working quite right its been a long day.

[amanda_feagle]

Thank you! This is helpful. I'm new to tracking this so I'm not quite sure where to gather all of this information. I found the "lost" links and the websites don't seem to be very high quality so I'm not too worried, however I'm having trouble finding the content they linked to. Any tips?

[EGOL]

There is something called "link rot"... that every site experiences.  You earn some links a long time ago and most of those links will eventually disappear for reasons described by effectdigital.    If your new content production pace is not as fast as in the past, then you can be losing more links than you are earning.   Link rot hits sites that are slacking on their content production.

And, as Mr Whippy said...  "The domain linking to you is clearing out links that point to your content as they feel there is better content to link to now."    Sometimes competitors will see your content, produce something much better, then solicit the linking websites to link to their content that is now much better than yours.   We receive lots of emails suggesting better destinations for links in existing articles.   These email messages can be valuable to a webmaster, but if we look at their suggested content and it is crap, we filter their email address to trash.

[MrWhippy]

Without seeing the data it is hard to say.

If you have a few years of data take a look back and see what fluctuations you have had previously.

Also, check the pages that the links were pointing to on your site make sure they haven't been removed.

If its a small number of links compared to your overall backlink profile then I wouldn't worry to much if its a big percentage of your overall backlink profile then I would be digging into it to see if you can stop it.

Is there any pattern to the links as I asked in my first response? are they all from one type of site? do they all link to old content?

[amanda_feagle]

Thank you both! So at what point do you think it's important to investigate to find the cause? And when do you think it's normal fluctuations?

[effectdigital]

This is a really good answer.

OP also needs to check the data they are looking at. Is it link growth data, or actual static link data? Some charts make it look as if your links are disappearing, when what they are really saying is less domains are 'creating' links to you over time (aka your link growth is slowing)

If OP is sure that their actual links are shrinking over time, Steve gave great answers

Here are some others:

• People re-designing their websites and streamlining their content, some links get removed as some old content (which may contain links) doesn't make it onto the new site
• People killing their own content even if it's not part of a re-design, removing old blog posts etc (which may contain links)
• People un-linking their internal links to insulate their own PageRank better, which leaves you with un-linked citations
• People adding no-follows to their links. These links should still be detected, but they won't count to your SEO any more
• People blocking the indexation of content that contains links (e.g: putting Meta no-index and / or robots.txt blocks on blog posts which contain links) as a risk nullification measure
• People moving their site from one domain to another. The new links from the new site should be found eventually, but often there's a trough where a backlink tool will see the old site is gone but it won't have found the new site yet!
• More people opting out of having their site crawled by backlink data suppliers (e.g: blocking rogerbot, Moz's crawler in robots.txt)

[MrWhippy]

There could be any number of reasons for this.

The domains linking to you are clearing up old content and removing it from their site if they no longer see it as valid or valuable.

The domain linking to you is clearing out links that point to your content as they feel there is better content to link to now.

Old domains disappearing off the web completely

For a more specific answer you  will need to provide us with more info, such as how old are the links, are they all from one type of websites such as directories or blog sites

Steve