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.
What would be causing our linking domains and inbound links to decline?
-
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!
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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?
-
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?
-
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)
-
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
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
-
What's Causing My Extremely Low Bounce Rate
My client's site that is reporting an under 10% bounce rate for all sources. Direct is the highest at 8%. I'm no expert in GA but wondering if there is a problem with the analytics/tag manager code on the site. I'm especially concerned about the GTM body script being in an iframe which I read could be trouble. <!-- Google Tag Manager (noscript) -->
Reporting & Analytics | | bradsimonis
<noscript><iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-MWGMNW6"
height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden"></iframe></noscript>
<!-- End Google Tag Manager (noscript) --> You can see all the source code here:
view-source:https://nfinit.com/0 -
If website users don't accept GDPR cookie consent, does that prevent GA-GTM from tracking pageviews and any traffic from that user that would cause significant traffic decreases?
I've been doing a lot research on GDPR impact and implementation with GTM-GA for clients, but it's been 12 months since GDPR has gone live I haven't found anything on how GA traffic has been impacted if users don't accept cookie consent. However, I'm personally seeing GA accounts taking huge losses in traffic since implementing GDPR cookie solutions (because GTM/GA tags aren't firing until cookies are accepted). Is it common for websites to see significant decreases in traffic due to too many users not accepting cookie consent? Are there alternative solutions to avoid traffic loss like that and still maintain GDPR compliance? It seems to me that the industry underestimated how many people won't accept cookie consent. Most of the documentation and articles around GDPR's start (May 2018) didn't foresee or cover that aspect properly, everything seems to be technically focused with the assumption that if implemented properly most people would accept cookie consent, but I'm personally not seeing that trend and it's destroying GA data (lost traffic, minimal source attribution, inaccurate behavior data, etc). Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Kickboard2 -
How to change domains in Google Analytics without losing the data
Hi there, We recently changed our domain from .COM to .NET so that all our subdomains from external pages matched. Right now in Google Console we have our new .NET website being tracked, but in GA we are still tracking .COM. It is also causing issues with MOZ crawling our site because of the .COM/.NET discrepancy. My question is what is the best way to change our Google Analytics from .COM to .NET without losing historical data and what considerations do we need to change before implementing this? Our team was concerned that just downloading the old data would be too vast and it we wouldn't be able to continue manipulating it dynamically in GA. Thanks!!
Reporting & Analytics | | cPanel-LLC.0 -
Vanity URL vs domain URL
Hi guys, Our CEO is having an interview with a known broadcaster on radio. During the interview he will mention a specific URL www.example.com/marketingcampaign that we want track on Google Analytics, therefore behaving like a vanity URL redirecting to the actual URL www.example.com/resources/primary-keyword-2018. Would this work the same way a vanity URL in terms of tracking or not such as following guideline here ? I am asking because vanity URLs are supposed to be completely different domain name that gets purchased and in our case it is the same domain name just with a different URI. thanks guys!
Reporting & Analytics | | Taysir0 -
Links On Expired Domains
Does anybody know if a link on an expired domain affects your SEO? I'm just asking because the SEO agency we used before used to create websites and then link to our company - very spammy. We have since ditched this agecny, however they wanted an extortionate amount to remove these links. Therefore, we decided to wait until these domains expired and then the links wouldn't exist. However, I am now completing a link audit and some of these sites are still appearing in the results (obtained from Link Research Tools) but I cannot access the links because the domains have expired. Can anyone help?
Reporting & Analytics | | AAttias0 -
Lost rankings after disavowing links
About two months ago, I received an unnatural inbound links message from Google. Then I disavowed 58 (the worst ones) and now I can see that right after the date I submitted my disavow file I'm losing rankings. What would you suggest? I don't really want to revoke my disavow file because it has totally bad links. I have this idea to build 58 links from high quality sites (instead of the 58 I disavowed). Do you think it'll work faster (if at all) or I just need to remove my disavow file?
Reporting & Analytics | | VinceWicks0 -
Open internal links in a new tab increase bonus rate?
Hello! This week I used a simple method to reduce my blog Google Analytics bounce rate. My blog all the posts are guides, in order to follow them, user need to download a zip file (same zip file). Otherwise they can't. Therefore I added a separate blog post to download all the necessary files. As a result of that I can reduce my bounce rate from 62-70% to 45-50% level. Now I'm thinking to open that zip file download page in a new tab. If I open my blog zip file download page, in a new tab. It will again increase my bounce rate? I reduced my bounce rate using that zip file download page. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Godad0 -
Should you get a new Google Analytics account if your site has a new domain after a site redesign/new development?
We recently developed a new site for a client and they have opted to move forward with a domain change. Should we create a new Google Analytics account for the new site?
Reporting & Analytics | | TheOceanAgency0