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
-
Can NoFollow Links Hurt SEO Efforts?
Hi Mozzers' I've been doing some research on a few sites and found that one or two contain allot of nofollow links, can these have a negative effect on seo efforts?
Competitive Research | | Kal-SEO0 -
Why such a difference in external followed links details?
I love using seomoz and have done for a few years. I am no SEO expert, but like to think I can get away with making out I know what I'm on about! I use opensiteexplorer regualrly and usually enjoy delving deeper into it's metrics, but one thing is bothering me (before I start with this, please forgive me if I am missing something obvious - you may have to point it out in your answer!) So I run a comparison of a few sites and pay attention to the external followed links section. On checking this number at root domain level, company A has 12,666 external followed links. So I want to dig a little deeper as to the qulaity of those links and click along to the inbound links tab, here I select the following: "followed & 301" > "only external" > "all links to this root domain" > leaving the results ungrouped Downloading this table I only have results for 3,416 links - why such a big difference to the previous 12,666 or am I missing something here? Would just like a bit of clarification 🙂
Competitive Research | | iThinkMedia0 -
What's the difference between 'external links' and 'linking domains to this domain' in my report?
I'm looking at a competitor analysis report. The number provided for 'external links' is 150. The number for 'external links to this domain' is 4860 and 'linking domains to this domain' is 232. What are the differences between these numbers?
Competitive Research | | lthompsonon0 -
Query for checking is a link to domain A already exists on domain B
Hi, I was wondering if anyone can help. I need to have a simple check where I have 2 domains, and I can check of there are any links from domain A to domain B. Does anyone what would be the best query for this and if you would use google, bing, yahoo or other SE. Many thanks
Competitive Research | | James770 -
Certainty or Uncertainty of SEO / Link Building
Hey there I'm new to both SEO and Seomoz. I have this personal site I've been working on SEO wise (slowly since I started learning from 0) and I have reached a point where the only missing thing for me to do is build links. However, the competitors for my site have thousands of links. From all I've read on the web regarding SEO&LinkBuilding, including articles in this site...the old method of spamming links wherever/whenever possible is now being penalized while the practice of manual/hand-built links of higher quality and lesser quantity is rewarded. So I went ahead and approached several linkbuilding companies and one thing that struck me was the level of uncertainty regarding the chances of getting a site to get to the first page. I understand there's factors you cannot predict or control, such as what your competitors are doing on the SEO front...but ultimately, I'm curious as to how do you effectively gauge the possibility of getting to the top page of any keyword combination? Especially when dealing with clients... since apparently whoever 'guarantees' you anything is a fraud or uses blackhat techniques...how do you pitch the 'uncertainty' to the client? Likewise...how do you know if you can make it to the top page or viceversa? Cheers
Competitive Research | | Sotkra0 -
Analyzing Back Links - Says site A has back link to Site B but when I look at site B I can't find any back link to Site A. Why?
I am new to SEO Moz - It looks like incredible technology. I was playing around with different websites to see where they had back linked to see how it works. Looked at a site called racingsecretsexposed [dot] come and it said that it had dozens of links to www.ndesignstudio.com such as: ndesign-studio.com/blog/best-wordpress-sites?replytocom=893 with link anchor text "laying horses" but when I do a search for the company name, or the anchor text "laying horses", or the owner of the company's name on ndesignstudio.com - nothing appears. Why not? Isn't the back link anchored by the text laying horses, which should link back to the racing secrets website? Thanks
Competitive Research | | NewtoSEO900 -
Link Analysis Tool
Does anyone have/use any really good link analysis tools? I have been using SEOmoz open site explorer but don't find it that indepth or find that many links. I don't mind paying once the link analysis tool is good and I can export links to excell. I was thinking of buying this software http://www.link-assistant.com/features-and-editions.html Cheers,
Competitive Research | | Socialdude0 -
Viewing Specific Links in OSE - For a Specific Month
(1) Can I use OSE to see the number of links per month a site acauired over the past year (month by month)? For example, I might be interested if I see a competitor acquired a surprisingly high number of links during December, 2010. (2) Can I use OSE to see the a list of links a site acquired during a specific time, such as December of 2010? For example, if I see a competitor suddenly acquired an unusually high number of links in December, 2010, I'd like to see a list of those links, to figure out how they acquired those links. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | GregMoore0