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
-
Is Link equity / Link Juice lost to a blocked URL in the same way that it is lost to nofollow link
Hi If there is a link on a page that goes to a URL that is blocked in robots txt - is the link juice lost in the same way as when you add nofollow to a link on a page. Any help would be most appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew-SEO0 -
Page dropped after backlink
This is a bit of a odd one... I put two new pages on to my website. And built one backlink to each page (each from separate domains). The pages and backlinks have indexed quite quickly. The odd thing is that one of my pages has dropped significantly in ranking but the other has boosted significantly in ranking! The 1st page has come to page 1 of google, the other pages dropped to page 3 of google. Prior to building the links the ranks was stable. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Wrong titles in site links
Hello fellow marketers, I have found this weird thing with our website in the organic results. The sitelinks in the SERP shows wrong written text. As in grammatically incorrect text. My question is where does Google get the text from? It is not the page title as we can see it. kKsFv0X.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | auke18101 -
Wikipedia links - any value?
Hello everyone. We recently posted some of our research to Wikipedia as references in the "External Links" section. Our research is rigorous and has been referenced by a number of universities and libraries (an example: https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/company-suffixes.php). Anyway, I'm wondering if these Wikipedia links have any value beyond of course adding to the Wiki page's information. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Harbor_Compliance0 -
Spam Links? -115 Domains Sharing the Same IP Address, to Remove or Not Remove Links
Out of 250 domains that link to my site about 115 are from low quality directories that are published by the same company and hosted on the same ip address. Examples of these directories are: -www.keydirectory.net -www.linkwind.com -www.sitepassage.com -www.ubdaily.com -www.linkyard.org A recent site audit from a reputable SEO firm identified 125 toxic links. I assume these are those toxic links. They also identified about another 80 suspicious domains linking to my site. They audit concluded that my site is suffering a partial Penguin penalty due to low quality links. My question is whether it is safe to remove these 125 links from the low quality directories. I am concerned that removing this quantity of links all at once will cause a drop in ranking because the link profile will be thin with only about 125 domains remaining that point to the site. Granted those 125 domains should be of somewhat better quality. I am playing with fire by having these removed. I URGENTLY NEED ADVICE AS THE WEBMASTER HAS INITIATED STEPS TO REMOVE THE 125 LINKS. Thanks everyone!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
Why my good links disappeared from gWMT?
Hi Last night some of my good links suddenly stopped from being display displayed at the WMT list of links Any thoghts? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0