Sudden and dramatic decrease in External Followed Links and Total External Links

[cyrjm]

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

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[TheCompleteWeb]

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.