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  4. Ahrefs - What Causes a Drastic Loss in Referring Pages?

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Ahrefs - What Causes a Drastic Loss in Referring Pages?

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  • AaronHenry
    AaronHenry Subscriber last edited by Mar 20, 2014, 3:25 PM

    While I was doing research on UK Flower companies I noticed that one particular domain had great rankings (top 3), but has slid quite a bit down to page two. After investigating further I noticed that they had a drastic loss of referring pages, but an increase in total referring domains. See this screenshot from ahrefs.

    I took a look at their historical rankings (got them from the original SEO provider's portfolio) and compared it to the Wayback Machine. There did not seem to be any drastic changes in the site structure. My question is what would cause such a dramatic loss in total referring pages while showing a dramatic increase in referring domains? It appears that the SEO company was trying rebound from the loss of links though.

    Any thoughts on why this might happen?

    56VD5jD

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Philip-DiPatrizio
      Philip-DiPatrizio @TommyTan last edited by Mar 21, 2014, 12:25 PM Mar 21, 2014, 12:25 PM

      The Google Disavow tool doesn't work like that.  It won't actually remove links from any pages.  It is basically just a signal to Google that you want those links to be nofollowed.  Ahrefs would have no clue if something has been disavowed or not.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
      • TommyTan
        TommyTan last edited by Mar 21, 2014, 12:23 PM Mar 21, 2014, 12:23 PM

        Hi,

        One thing that comes to mind is using the Disavow tool.  The UK Flower company might have used the Disavow tool to remove all the referring pages that they thought were spam.

        Philip-DiPatrizio 1 Reply Last reply Mar 21, 2014, 12:25 PM Reply Quote -1
        • Philip-DiPatrizio
          Philip-DiPatrizio last edited by Mar 21, 2014, 7:06 PM Mar 20, 2014, 11:47 PM

          First thing that comes to mind is maybe the site had a lot of site-wide links before.  If it had 5,000 or 10,000 links coming from 1 single domain and that website went down, that would be a huge loss of referring pages in a short amount of time.  Maybe they were in web directories and asked to be removed?  While simultaneously attempting to build some high quality backlinks from more referring pages?

          It's all speculation of course, but plausible.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
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