Links (external and total) have significantly decreased in 1 month from August to October - why?
-
Greetings,
After comparing a few stats in one of my campaigns, I noticed that External Followed Links, Total External Links, and Total Links significantly decreased from August 29th to when I just checked them a few days ago (October 3).
Any ideas on why this happened?
For example, Total External Links went from 50,589 to 39,203.
Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Jenny
-
I'm still trying to get access to GWT for this client, so will definitely check that out. Good call and thanks!!
-
Kyle,
Thanks again for the ongoing help and information - you rock! Our domain authority stayed the same. I'll definitely check out the links to the resources you provided as well. Thanks again!
Jenny
-
Jenny, here is a full list of post were rand and other SEOMoz associates talk about the updates to the mozscape index (which powers OSE and the pro tools):
http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=mozscape+update%3A
In regards to your question of what is mozscape here is another great resource:
http://www.seomoz.org/help/what-is-mozscape
In regards to your last question, it sounds like it was a blend of you losing some links and the mozscape fluctuations. Always take OSE data with a grain of salt, that information is simply to give you insight to trends in your link profile. Did your domain authority drop or stay the same during the changes?
- Kyle
-
Yeah this is the first thing you should do. WMT should give you a more exact number of links than OSE, and those numbers don't tend to fluctuate as much - unless there is an actual loss/gain of a larger number of links/LRDs.
-
Can't believe I didn't think of this earlier, but are you comparing the numbers you're getting here to the numbers you're getting from Google Webmaster Tools? Did you also see a drop in backlinks there?
-
I just learned about vlookup this year. Super useful for cross-referencing spreadsheets.
Here's how it works. In the same Excel document, you will have two sheets. The first one will have all the data from your last OSE report, the one with 50K links. (I'm assuming you exported this.) The second sheet will have all the data from your more recent OSE report, the one with 30k links. The vlookup function will quickly check if something on the first sheet is also on the second sheet.
If it's on the first sheet but not on the second sheet, then that's one of the links that "disappeared." Look those over, check for patterns, test some of them. Maybe you had a sitewide link on a giant website, and that website just went down. But if the missing links are still online, then OSE simply didn't crawl them this time.
If you've never used vlookup before, it's worth spending a few hours reading tutorials, watching videos (tons on YouTube!), and learning the syntax. Best of luck!
-
I'm not familiar with the vlookup function. Is it pretty difficult? I'm pretty good at research and picking things up though so if that's the way to go about it I can give it a go.
Thanks so much for your ongoing assistance.
Jenny
-
How comfortable are you with Excel? Do you know how to use the vlookup function?
-
Forgive this newbie response, but how do I check to see which URLs have disappeared? There are over 10,000 Total External Links which disappeared so let me know if there's an easy way to do this please.
-
Hmm, interesting. I'm new to the pro tool so please forgive this question - but what exactly is the mozscape index and why does it fluctuate?
One competitor went down slightly and another went up, so it seems specific to only our site. So does that indicate a mozscape index fluctuation or something different?
Thanks so much for your help!
-
Have you checked the disappearing URLs to see if they're still online?
-
Keep in mind if you are pulling these stats from OSE or the pro tool that the amount of domains and URLs differ each time they update the mozscape index. So the total amounts may change depending on the variations from those two months.
Have you noticed this change with your competitors sites as well or is it specific to only our site?
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
-
Why are there significant changes in the amount of duplicate content without any known action?
I've noticed a surprisingly rapid change in duplicate content over the past month. I'd noticed ~6,000 instances of duplicate content, after disavowing bad links we went down to 3k, this makes perfect sense to me. But after that, without doing anything whatsoever, from last Thursday, the 20th, to yesterday the instances of duplicate content decreased again down to 2k. Could this just be a delayed indexing of pages or are there other factors here? Thanks for the help.
Moz Pro | | allurez0 -
Is there an external tool to check for Link Balance profile (anchor text)?
Hi, Regarding the topic of Link Balance (anchor text from external sites). Is there an external tool you can point to your site or an individual URL that can give you the link balance (branded terms, exact match etc). This article is great:
Moz Pro | | STL
http://moz.com/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization But it's a lot of work to do for individual pages (of which we have many). Just trying to see if there's a tool out there (Moz or otherwise), that can report on such balance on a page-by-page basis (paste in URL, hit 'Go'). Thanks.
Rich Talbot0 -
Pages Crawled: 1 Why?
I have some campaigns which have only 1 page crawled, while some other campaigns, having completely similar URL (subdomain) and number of keywords and pages, have all pages crawled... Why is that so? It has been also a while I waited and so far no change...
Moz Pro | | BritishCouncil0 -
Tracking External Followed Inbound Links - Are We Getting Fooled?
This question is not about how to use SEOMOZ Link tools. It's about the numbers themselves and how their fluctuations are causing confidence issues.... My client wants to track inbound followed links over time. But as I understand it, this number will vary depending on the Linkscape crawling success (or even outages or partial crawls.) In the past few reports, we've had wild fluctuations which have made them very nervous. If my client wants to track inbound followed links over time, what SEOMOZ metric should we use for the most reliable progress checks?
Moz Pro | | scottclark0 -
Crazy competitive link analysis, 1 - 40 - 38
I'm seeing very strange results on my competitive link analysis. It used to give me a fairly constant domain authority of 38, now one hour i'm seeing 1, then 38 then back to 1 but if I look in opensite explorer it says I have 40. The same weirdness is having to every other stat in the section both in the overview and more detailed section. The same thing is happening with one of the other competitors i'm comparing my link profile with. What's going on?
Moz Pro | | AquanautsUK0 -
Does Google have a direct link with facebook and twitter?
Google monitor social media. What I'm wondering is do Google use the same tools we have on Facebook's API, Twitter's API etc to use in their SERPs Or do Facebook grant Google more detailed access to see who has liked links etc. I think it's quite an interesting point as surely I can push up my own count by repeatedly sharing my own links, which wouldn't be genuine. If Google had better access they could then determine what's been faked etc.
Moz Pro | | PhotoGazza0 -
What is the difference between followed/no followed/ internal/ external links? And how do i improve them?
Am on a beginner level of SEO and as a pro member when i ran a report for my site i found some basic terms used. Can anyone please let me know what exactly is the difference between these terms and how important are they and how do i improve them?. or please let me know a source to find out.
Moz Pro | | NikhilM0 -
Missing back links in Open Site Explorer?
I'm looking at the Open Site Explorer for my site, and it shows 9 links to my site, all from 2 domains (showing all links from all pages and for both www and not www version of my domain name). But I know for sure that there are other sites linking to my site. Are they not there because they are not important or because the links have not been crawled yet?
Moz Pro | | jsoldi0