Sudden and dramatic decrease in External Followed Links and Total External Links
-
I'm not sure how or why this has happened but from a span of a week my client's site went from 518 total external links to 97. I also saw a dramatic decrease in traffic for that week as well. I'm new to the SEO game but I have not made any changes to their content other than importing old blog posts that did not get migrated to their new host.
Any thoughts? www.cobbcountyattorneys.com
Thanks!
JC
-
Which tool are you using to measure backlinks? We did just have an update to Open Site Explorer, and it could be that there were links we crawled last time that we either didn't crawl this time or that weren't there this time.
-
It's possible that your website had a sitewide link on another website. That may mean it was in the "Recent Posts" category in a widget box or any other location that would be seen on every page of that site. Once that website added enough posts to push your link off that widget, you would no longer have a backlink on every page of that website. Therefore, your total links would drop dramatically. Furthermore, if that website received a fair bit of traffic, the link would no longer be shown to those visitors and ergo, the traffic would also decrease.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Shortened URL showing as linking page
I'm using Open Site Explorer to look at backlinks and referring pages to my site. I'm seeing 3 links coming from http://j.mp/XXXXXX (not actual link) which is a bitly shortened URL. It shows as a 301 redirect, and I'm trying to figure out if there is any way to find where that link is originating from? When I try to search for the exact j.mp url in google it brings up one result which is the page the link redirects to. Any Ideas? Thanks a lot.
Competitive Research | | CJ50 -
Creating Free Website Accounts (Weebly, Wix, Wordpress.com, etc) for Linking Purposes?
Greetings Mozzers, I came a cross several sites and when looking at their link profile I found they had several links from these free services to gain links. Obviously duplicate content is bad, but if all the content on each one was completely unique, would these links be of quality? Let's say, 1 link per site that is external to your site. I know it's a tricky topic but just wanted thoughts, would the above be a potentially beneficial method for gaining a simple quality link. Your advice and information is much appreciated!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Ecommerce seo - competitors are using spammy links to rank HELP
After setting up SEO Moz and whilst waiting for it to crawl my site i have checked out my competitors who are ranking for the keywords i am going after. It appears from what i can see in OSE that they are ranking with back links from spammy looking sites and lots of exact match anchor text. I have tried to match a few links with what they have currently without getting myself into anything too spammy but i really don't want to follow how they have done it exactly. The niche i am in is pretty boring but the rewards are great but i am finding creating content and distributing it correctly difficult which is why i need some help. My site is roughly 9 months old and the product descriptions are hand written trying to give as much info as possible with a hint of personality so no cookie cutter back of the box descriptions. i have matched a few of the links from competitors which weren't too spammy and as relevant as i could get to my niche, i have also created articles for some article directories - all of which isn't really getting me very far and i am running out of ideas on how to create new content & the types of new content to help me get back links naturally. If any of you friendly guys could offer me some assistance in setting up a basic seo campaign which would help me target my keywords i would be very much in your debt
Competitive Research | | GarethEJones0 -
Only 4 Internal Followed Links
Hello , i compared our (www.bighunter.net) and competitor pages. Only 4 internal Followed Links are in result page . I don't understand why Thanks for any answer
Competitive Research | | lbecarelli0 -
Two links with the same quality but different effect
Hi, the website I'm working for is loosing rankings for one specific keyword and since there haven't been any bigger onsite changes I assume it's the back links. The company bought some exact anchor text links in the past, so I went through those. One specific one attracted my attention: It's a site wide link which creates over 80% of the back link profile to the specific website. There was only one catch: part of this bought anchor text campaign is another highly targeted anchor text which is not negatively affected by the rankings. Still I didn't like the feel of this so I ran the seomoz keyword difficulty report. And there I discovered an interesting pattern: For keyword A we are the only ones in the top10 with such a high percentage of exact keyword usage. But for keyword B, which didn't loose rankings our top10 competitor have an even more over-optimized keyword usage or much weaker back link profile. So now I wonder if it could actually be the case, that we loose rankings for keyword A since our competitors have a more natural profile, but for Keyword B it has no negative effect due to the worse competition. Thanks in advance for your help!
Competitive Research | | RomiSverige0 -
Link to landing page or home page
Ok, so I've been doing a bit of link research and found that most of our competitors use anchor text to link to their homepage on their site and not a specific landing page. Our current strategy is to link to the correct landing page depending on the anchor to get these to rank, as opposed to getting our homepage to rank for different keywords. If that makes sense. The main reason I can think of to send all links to the homepage is that it would increase the domain authority of the site as a whole. Instead of spreading the links to certain pages depending on the anchor text. It would also give your one page a greater chance to rank for all keywords? Quick example I am a site that sells sports clothes. I have 2 main pages from my homepage: Homepage Football Rugby _Should I link to the football page for all links anchored with "football", and all linked anchored with "rugby" to the rugby page OR should I anchor all links including "rugby" and "football" to the homepage? _ What do you think is the best strategy? Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | esendex0 -
Competitive Link Research Tool is not working
I receive a busy message each time I try. This has been out of commission the last several times I've tried it.
Competitive Research | | cmiller0 -
Inbound links
Is the any report that will show the reciprocal vs one-way inbound links?
Competitive Research | | FastCashOnlineInc0