Good explanation BB. I had to give you a thumbs up for using the word "eviscerating." I love it!

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

|

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?

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

Trying to get to a good solution for what I was wanting has inspired me to write a complete blog post on everything we are working to accomplish with our Video SEO. After search high and low, I did find exactly what I was looking for. It is a tool called "CaptionBox."  There is a WordPress plug-in available. Information on the page explains that it's a legacy product, but we are going to install it anyway. For more information on SpeakerText's answer to my question as to whether or not we could still use their product despite not being an Enterprise customer, stay tuned for a blog post within the next 3-4 days.

I agree that 99% of the time multiple H1 tags are not best. However, imagine your Web site is a trilogy with three completely separate volumes. In a case like this I think the site title tag might  "Trilogy of 3 books" - and then there could very well be a blurb about each separate book on the home page. The titles of each one of those books could be an H1 tag.

Now, one could argue that each of those "books" maybe should have its own Web site, that's probably another discussion

Yes, multiple H2 and H3s are perfectly okay as long as they make sense. Think about the outline of a book or research paper. You could have Chapter 1, followed by several or many subchapters, and each of those subchapters or subheadings could have subsections. As long as those headings make sense in terms of the structure of your content, it's perfectly ok. There are even times when multiple H1 tags are okay. For example a very big site, or business, that might have three different arms of the business that all want to be represented equally on the home page, might possibly have multiple H1s (although be really really careful with that).  Hope this helps!