Why the sudden link drop?
-
A the end of November I am showing that our total links were 118k. Current links are 22k. We changed sites early November so that was about three weeks before. What would cause the drop of about 100k links? Or where should I start investigating?
-
The 301s were not right, but we fixed 99% of them in early December. I did double check them this week. Not sure what else to look for.
-
Now hearing more about your situation. I found the answer. When there is a site redesign, sometimes pages can get lost in translation. I had this happened with Leads do com project that I worked on and saw something similar that was going to happen until I spoke and made sure proper 301 for old pages were set to go to the new locations.
This is really important, can you double check to see if this was done properly. If those pages were somehow lost it would be a large contributing factor in the lose of page rank juice, rankings, and overall traffic.
-
We have no direct relationships with anyone. Every link we got just appeared, nobody made an effort to get any. We didn't have a lot of great links anyway. We never had an SEO strategy. We used out of the box software for a decade. Than in Early November we launched a redesigned site and got killed organically. I don't think anyone made a decision to drop us as a link because we never had a strategy and to be honest didn't have that great of links with the few we did have. I will run Majestic now and see what it shows. I really think this is something on our end. We had great developers, but they don't know a lot about seo.
-
This is in stride to what Iriving mentioned. I am not sure of your website's goal or potential, but that is a very alarming drop. Do you know who is linking to you direct; meaning do you have relationship? If not I would try to contact them for an answer why. I mean they could have adjusted their SEO strategy. Maybe the links were site-wide links and they could have changed a design or template that removed your link. Or again, they may have decided to just drop your link and if it was site wide on many of the websites, this would be a close answer to the sudden loss of backlinks and pages that loose rankings in Google's SERP.
-
I am not showing any link spam but I did use ahrefs and a few things came up. We lost 90 backlinks in one day at the end of November. Overal in two months we have gone from 1800 backlinks to 1600. At the end of December we had 380 referring domains and it dropped to 227 in one day, not back up to 330.
-
I would consider what Irving mentioned above. It's time to do a link audit using a power tool like Majestic SEO. You could had a huge link partner disco from your website. This affect can drop a bomb on your website if your problem is indeed external.
-
Did you see my response above about Google reporting the 404/soft404s that are missing pages. This could be CMS related. What CMS system are you using?
-
I am showing no soft 404s and no server errors. Where would I see the 404s? We actually don't use cms we had a site custom built.
-
I am showing no soft 404s and no server errors. Where would I see the 404s? We actually don't use cms we had a site custom built.
-
I used screaming from and didn't see any duplicates. All status codes were 200. What else should I be looking for?
-
Google should let you click on the pages that are showing 404 or soft404. You can see the location and do a little research yourself. Chances are you/your organization might have deleted some pages by accident or your cms system is could be jacked up. 404s are a very bad thing for your website and organic traffic.
-
How do I find out in WMT if they were internal or external? Three things in WMT that seem like problems. End of December have about 250k indexed pages. The following week we have 80k. Mid November we have about 3k not found now we have 225k not found. For the sitemap we have about 18k submitted and only 9k indexed.
-
Try to use Majestic SEO or Ahrefs. Ahrefs will sample for you for free. Majestic SEO is a monster tool you can use but cost! Just try to do link profile study just to see if there is link spam associated with your website. Just curious!
The only idea here for sudden loss in rankings or links is related to duplicate content, 404s, soft 404s, aka broken links to pages or deleted pages that were once ranked/cached with Google.
Hope this makes sense.
-
We have never had a link building campaign or paid for a single link. Even if they were diluted, wouldn't they still show up in open site?
-
Did many of those pages have duplicate content problems. Do a quick audit on the website using "Screaming Frog". It's free to use and is fast. You can also export csv reports and study in excel. Let me know what you find!
-
find out if they were internal or external you can see that in WMT
if internal it's probably a reflection of different site navigation and number of links on your pages (and number of paged)
if external it's 404'ing links (make sure you are 301'ing everything important) or links getting devalued or dropped by sites. Sometimes a site can be linking to you 200,000 times and then remove your links overnight.
-
Originally they were all 302s, we had that changed to 301s. in mid December. We started to see improvement after that though. We never had anyone attempt to linkbuild though so I have no idea how we even had 118k links, a lot must have been internal. Organic traffic is down quite a bit though so there is some sort of problem.
-
Yea check this too; great answer here. I just don't know why people are doing this without 301 in a .htaccess file to new location. But it's hard to tell if the poster is having problems internally or externally?!
-
These links were probably diluted by the late and famous Google Penguin Algorithm. This algorithm was targeted at websites that have over optimized link building. This including using the same anchor text over and over.
Use Majestic SEO or Ahrefs to look at the link profile.
You can certainly do an audit on your links and determine if you have enough resources to go through a disavow process.
I would focus on instead setting a budge for quality directory submissions using branded keywords and or press releases for new content your website produces.
*Also avoid doing too much link building in a 0 to 90 period. You just don't need as many links anymore!
This should help you move forward.
-
when u changed sites did you 301 redirect all of the old URLs to the new URLs? if not then those links pointing to your site are 404'ing and got dropped.
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
-
Internal links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Should we optimise our internal links?
Hi again, We recently had a technical search audit done by a specialist agency and they discovered a number of internal links that caused redirects to happen. The agency has recommended we update all of these links to link directly to the destination so we don't lose out on link equity. We'd just like to know if you think this would be a worthwhile use of our time. Our web team seem to think that returning a 301 to a crawler means that the crawler will stop indexing the original URL and instead index the redirected destination? Thanks all. Clair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iescape2 -
Affiliate Links Dilemma
Hello everyone. Our e-commerce website virtualsheetmusic.com has several hundreds affiliate incoming links, and many of them are "follow" links. I thought to redirect all incoming affiliate links to a "intermediate" page excluded by the robots.txt file in order to avoid any possible "commercial links" penalty from Google, but I now face a dilemma... most of our best referral links are affiliate links, by excluding those links from our back link profile could give us a big hit in terms of rankings. How would you solve this dilemma? What would you suggest doing in this sort of cases?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Link Spring Clean
Hey, Based on the most up to date thinking - what's the best way to approach a link spring clean? We've got a site with a large amount of links (a few of which look a bit spammy - SEO directories etc) Also, the brand changed it's name and URL a while back so there are directory/web citations using the old URL and sometimes the old name. The old URL is 301'd but I'm thinking (especially in terms of local SEO) these citations with differnt business names/numbers/web addresses could be particularly harmful? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia1 -
Infographic links were good?
I submit infographic to visual.li, source and a little description. Are these links were good for website link profile? And can I submit same inforgraphi to other websites? http://visual.ly/divya-ashwagandha-churna
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Link Type Analysis
Howdy Moz Fans, Just wondering if anyone knows any tools to which can identify link types. E.g. is the link - navigational, in the footer or in the body text. Specifically for internal links. Any suggestions? Cheers, RM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
I got message in my Google webmaster tool: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Does anyone knows the difference between "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" and "Unnatural links to your site" Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Aside from creative link bait, what's a solid link building strategy involve?
All things considered, directories, blogs, articles, press releases, forums, social profiles, student discount pages, etc, what do you consider to be a strong, phased, link building strategy? I'm talking beyond natural/organic link bait, since many larger accounts will not allow you to add content to their website or take 6 months to approve a content strategy. I've got my own list, but would love to hear what the community considers to be a strong, structured, timeline-based strategy for link building.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman1