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I've been monitoring root domain total links for a website over the past couple of months and recently noticed a significant drop at the beginning of July.Specifically, I have been tracking the total links for the root domain using open site explorer. Since April the total number or links has been fluctuating among 860,000 - 865,000. However at the beginning of July, they dropped to 93,127 and now sit only at 110,831.This is a very significant and troubling decrease and I am wondering what the cause could be? Did Moz change the way they report/determine the total link metrics? It is especially baffling since neither total internal nor total external links have seen significant decreases.

One of our new clients recently encountered a site-wide ranking drop for many keywords and I'm pretty confident regarding their link profile as to being 98% legit.

Background:

1. Client full site is https, and all http pages are 301 redirected to their https counterpart

2. Client has ~50 links partners (all legitimate sites + schools etc) links to client with urls such as www.example.com/portal/123.aspx that redirects to www.example.com.

3. Client homepage 301 redirects from www.example.com to www.example.com/default.aspx and then 301 redirects to the relative url "/Home.aspx".

4. Client launched some testing with Google website optimizer tool. ~1-2 months ago.

Symptoms:

1. Rankings dropped for basically many/all 30-40+ keywords by ~15 positions

2. Seomoz reports close to a double of existing pages +  (600+) duplicate content in the same date range. Webmasters only report 80 duplicate titles though.

3. Domain authority by seomoz reduced a bit + backlinks recorded by seomoz to the website nearly halved in the past 2 months.

I'm not sure if I narrowed this towards the right direction, and it isn't clear when the relative url 301 redirect was implemented:

1. The 301 redirect to the relative page (www.example.com/default.aspx to "/home.aspx") is accounting for the loss of links recorded by seomoz.

2. The ~50 links the client currently use (www.example.com/portal.123.aspx 301 redirecting to www.example.com, also relative) as a tracking tool is being considered 301 redirect abuse.

3. Maybe something went wrong with the usage of google optimizer tool for SEO purposes? Visitor traffic to each of the tested pages looked fine.

I would greatly appreciate any advice/insights on what I might be missing in terms of direction / factors.

Thanks!

Alex

Hello Staff of SEOMoz!

I just had a question regarding specialized local listings.  Are there any advantages to having specialized local listings? (An example would be if we were a medical company, having a listing for family practice, one listing for women's health) If there are advantages, what are those advantages compared to having general medical listings?

Thanks!

Hey guys,

So I was doing some backlink analysis for a client and was utilizing Open Site Explorer, which stated that I had roughly 2,111 External Followed Links.  However, I can't seem to find a way to export all 2,111 backlinks.  I wanted to make sure if the links I had acquired had been indexed and crawled, and picked up, but I can't seem to access the full list on a domain level, only on the subdomain level.

Anybody have any suggestions or advice?  Any would be helpful!

Best,

James