Drop in Links According to Webmaster Tools
-
Webmaster tools is telling me the links to my site has dropped by 100,000 links in one month.
Can someone please tell me what may have happened?
-
I haven't paid for anything - trying to stay white hat right?
But before me could be another story?
You are right, http://www.ahrefs.com states that my linking domains has gone up
thanks for your help again!
-
Good explanation BB. I had to give you a thumbs up for using the word "eviscerating." I love it!
-
That makes sense, good point. Thanks.
-
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?
-
Of course I din't keep any such list of what the links were. All I have is a tracking sheet to ensure that my "Link Building" campaign was actually happening LOL This is according to Webmaster tools, links to my site:
May - 267,678
Start of Link Building Campaign
June - 290, 664
July - 226, 735
August - 152,009
Sept - 46,512
-
Hi Dana
Why might the links generated by a news story or new product perhaps be less permanent than others?
BB
-
If you're lucky enough to have kept a record of the linking domains, you could search to see if Google has taken some sites out of their index by doing a "site:" search, ie:
site:domain-that-links-to-me.com
and if you get no results, I believe that's because Google has de-indexed them.
If you pay for a lot of content sharing type links, they are likely to be on sites that Google will get round to eviscerating eventually.
What percentage of total links have gone?
-
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
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
-
Linking to press coverage, reciprocal links?
We have been generating decent online press coverage with links to our site thanks to our PR agency and I have been asked to link to the online coverage from our website in a 'press coverage' section. My question is would google consider links from our site to the online press coverage as reciprocal links? Thanks
Link Building | | gavinr
Gavin0 -
Disavow Link Tool from Bing Webmaster Tools
Okay - anyone else read about the new tool release from Bing especially the disavow tool? Very cool - id love to hear some chatter on what you guys think! Link:
Link Building | | kchandler
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/06/27/disavow-links-you-don-t-trust.aspx Here is to hoping Google will follow suit! Cheers - Kyle0 -
Why does my website have 2,000+ links, but only 16 linking root domains?
Why does my website have 2,000+ links, but only 16 linking root domains?
Link Building | | thestudio40 -
Links and keywords
A rather simple question, If i have a paragraph and have the words cat, dog and bird would it be a good idea to have them all linking to the same url? or is better to have them all going to different urls?
Link Building | | Vetshopgroup0 -
Do sites on the same c-block and same server count as seperate linking root domains when linking to each other?
Lets say there are 50 businesses who have their website on the same server and are on the same c-block but the owners of the individual sites are different (i.e. they are all completely different sites not relevant to each other). Each of those sites are linking to each other due to a feature on the sites. This obviously increases the number of total links to each site but does it also increase the number of linking root domains? Or does this just show up as one linking root domain due to all of them being on the same server and the sharing the same c-block?
Link Building | | cinternicola0 -
Linking from Blogs
Hi I like to link from blogs on similar keywords on a regular basis but I am thinking about changing tactics as it can appear monotonous and un natural. What are peoples experiences in linking from blogs ?
Link Building | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Panda Update: Isn't a link still a link?
I was doing some link building and some SEO's said that the Panda update affected many websites. I am going to use eZineArticles.com as my example. EzineArticles was affected by the Panda update and does not show up in the SERPs as much as before. But they still have doFollow Links coming from the articles I am submitting. QUESTION: Regardless if EzineArticles was affected by the Panda Update, isn't a "Follow Link" still a "Follow Link" OR am I completely wasting my time on this devalued website? Edit: Yes I know a PR 0 page is not as valuable as a PR 9 page. I am asking from the standpoint of the affected Panda Update domains overall.
Link Building | | Francisco_Meza0