Any number of things could have happened William. How many links did you have before the drop. Some fluctuations are normal, especially if you released a new product or made it into a news story, your links can skyrocket for a time then settle back down. Or, it could be that you had a lot of links from bad directories that Google has de-indexed (same is true for blog networks, etc.)

Have you tried viewing your link profile in http://www.ahrefs.com ? You might get a better idea of what's going on if you look there. Interested to know what you see there? Hope that helps!

Dana

Good question BB. Think about how news stories are published. Say you make page one for something. That news site might have 3 or 4 thousand pages. Say they have links to all the latest headlines on the right hand side of their template and that your news is in that list. As long as you are a headline, boom, you are linked from 3 or 4 thousand pages. As soon as your story is no longer front page, those links from all the pages go away and you retain just the one from the article that remain in their archive. In this scenario, you lost a lot of links, but you didn't lose any linking domains.

That being said, my guess is that you might have lost 100,000 links, but those links were from a small handful of linking root domains. If you lost 100,000 linking domains, that would be truly alarming. I am guessing that's not the case.

Hope that explanation made sense. What were you able to see in Ahrefs?

Did you pay for any featured links in any directories? Or perhaps maybe someone did this prior to you coming on board. I can't say for sure, but this is a very likely scenario. Again, focus more on the number and quality of your linking domains. I have seen fluctuations like this before and they aren't necessarily cause for concern.

For example, I am in house SEO for a company that does audio video installations. For a couple of months our products were picked up and listed in a trade magazine online. This temporarily inflated our links being reported in Webmaster Tools. Here's what that looked like. While this looks like a decrease, the number of linking domains actually has gone up:

<colgroup><col width="68"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
| 4/17/2012 | 20,339 |
| 4/20/2012 | 20,156 |
| 5/1/2012 | 18,812 |
| 5/8/2012 | 17,576 |
| 5/15/2012 | 17,432 |
| 5/29/2012 | 16,280 |
| 6/7/2012 | 13,544 |
| 9/21/2012 |

13,362

|

If you haven't seen it already, watch his full MozCon 2012 video here for free: http://moz.com/blog/2012-mozcon-videos-are-here  It's the second big image link on the page. It's priceless.

I understand why blog comments might be "nofollow" - because it preserves the page authority of the post. However, I don't understand why one would want to "noindex" blog comments. It seems to me that all that UGC, if indexed, would just make the page it resides on far more valuable.

Is my view of that skewed? Am I missing something? Thanks! (and sorry to answer your question with a question)

If it were me I would nofollow the comments but index the content of the comments.

Hi Cylo, I'm not sure if saying Google caches dynamic pages automatically is an accurate thing to say. I would say it like this: Google is more apt to cache and index a dynamic page if it is given a SEO-friendly URL.  Perhaps a Mozzer who is more technically adept than I can comment on the accuracy of that statement.

That being said I definitely wouldn't recommend using dynamic URLs (which it sounds like you are not). Here is how you can set up URL-rewrites in your .htaccess file if you are on a Linux server: http://www.webconfs.com/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-article-3.php

Not sure if that's helpful at all. I hope it is somewhat

Dana

Hi Thomas,

I am always learning too and am very interested by your question. Are you based in the UK but hosted in the US? Or are you based and hosted in the US? The reason I ask, is that if you are based in the US, I presume that your target market is US. If you are based in the UK I presume your target market is UK-Europe. If the latter is true, have you considered changing to UK hosting? Although I don't know the whole story, it seems from looking at your site that you are indeed UK based.

I am thinking that you are having a bit of trouble ranking for a more British term because you are USA hosted. I do think the location of your host is a factor in ranking for certain terms. The problem is, I can't point to any proof to support that opinion. I am interested to hear what others have to say about this.

Thanks Thomas!

Dana

Having just gone through the pain of fixing a meta refresh on a large e-commerce site, I would highly recommend fixing the meta refresh and making it a 301-redirect instead.

I would strongly recommend against telling Google to de-index the vanity URL because, chances are, that's the URL people are going to remember and use if they want to link back to your client's site. Chances are, the link profile is already fragmented. All the external links linking to the vanity profile are giving clout to that URL, but it's not passing on to the flagship site. Have you put both URLs in OSE to compare the linking profiles of each? Definitely do this before you make any big changes. (You may have already considered all of this, I'm not sure). But I can tell you from experience, fixing the meta refresh and putting in a proper 301-redirect will have a significant impact.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Thomas, I've been doing a little research trying to support my hypothesis that the location of your hosting company can effect your SERP results and I found this:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

This is probably a great starting point.

Thanks EGOL,

Yes, I understand well that .pdf documents can be indexed. That's not my concern. My concern is that a bot that navigates to one of our many .pdf tech specs documents, which, incidentally, contains no outbound links to anything, would then become trapped and not be able to continue crawling the site. This is particularly true because we have them set up to open in a new window. In the example above, sure, there's a text reference back to the site "www.kingdom.com" - but it isn't a link in the .pdf. There are no links, in any of our .pdfs.

So, what is the best way to deal with this? Go back and rework our .pdfs so they at least contain a link back to the homepage? In addition toAs well as configure the hyperlinks so they open in the same window instead of a new one?