Did anyone else just lose a bunch of backlinks?

[digidoodles]

I had a guy email me asking me to help him figure out what happened... he lost 66% of his links (2K total). I didn't have any hand in building any of these links or any of the SEO work. (this is important in a second..)

Another client, a few hours later, wrote me and asked me to help him figure out why we lost 500 links on his project. I DID build these.

So, it appears there's some scrubbing going on... anyone else lose a bunch of links?

Can we somehow figure out a pattern?

Thanks for any insight!

Warmly,

Brandi

[Fraggler]

As I said in the other thread, have you checked to see if the missing links actually still exist? Find one that you know was discovered by the spider you are using to check your backlinks with and see if the is still on that page. It may have been deleted, it may have moved to another page. It may have been artificially boosted by a plugin like I mentioned in the other thread.

The only time I get a large drop in links is when my comments drop from the sitewide plugins.

Note: YSE seems to remove links from its index in chunks, not gradually like when it credits them.

[Goatboy]

I dropped somewhere in the neighborhood of 90%. It didn't affect my rank any, in fact I'm a bit higher.

[AndyBlackSEO]

I believe this could be to do with the new Google algo. Could be wrong.

[Tom Goodwin]

It has happened to me when yahoo site explorer temporarily went down or stopped providing all the links. In each case the links were back 24 hours later.

Note that this is when I was looking through spyglass.

Originally Posted by digidoodles

I had a guy email me asking me to help him figure out what happened... he lost 66% of his links (2K total). I didn't have any hand in building any of these links or any of the SEO work. (this is important in a second..)

Another client, a few hours later, wrote me and asked me to help him figure out why we lost 500 links on his project. I DID build these.

So, it appears there's some scrubbing going on... anyone else lose a bunch of links?

Can we somehow figure out a pattern?

Thanks for any insight!

Warmly,

Brandi

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by AndyBlackSEO

I believe this could be to do with the new Google algo. Could be wrong.

I don't think google caffeine or algo would have anything to do with this. Yahoo site explorer wouldn't care what google's algo is For most of us, if you look for your backlinks with a google "links:" command you might only get 1% of your backlinks anyways.

[brp002]

Well for some people they have a lot of BS links like from forums or blogs. Well if that website goes down then you loose all of your links. So for instance Warrior Forum I use signature for people just to go to my sites but If Warrior forum would go down I would lose 300 links or so. Some people might get worried but no big deal!

[Scott Rankin]

You're not losing any links. This has happened many times before and they usually come back with time. Even if they don't, you'll never be able to see all the links you really have with any of those tools.

The fact is those tools don't show nearly accurate volumes of links, as they have no incentive too. There are many reasons why this is so, but don't worry about it. The only thing that matters is rankings.

You can outrank thousands of links with a few quality links from trusted websites. I rarely even check how many links I have for websites I work on. I only check rankings weekly. Trust me, it's not a big deal.

[jamiedolan]

Originally Posted by Scott Rankin

You're not losing any links. This has happened many times before and they usually come back with time. Even if they don't, you'll never be able to see all the links you really have with any of those tools.

The fact is those tools don't show nearly accurate volumes of links, as they have no incentive too. There are many reasons why this is so, but don't worry about it. The only thing that matters is rankings.

You can outrank thousands of links with a few quality links from trusted websites. I rarely even check how many links I have for websites I work on. I only check rankings weekly. Trust me, it's not a big deal.

Given the choice of building thousands of Pr0 and Pr1 links or building links from 50-100 high quality Pr5+ sites (where you knew they would stick), which would you choose?

Do you analyze and target the sites that appear most favorable to your competitors SERP?

Jamie

[TargetedTrafficSolutions]

Over the last two months in particular I have noticed dramatic link drops with primarily GWT used for confirmation.


I run a test group of domains that total around 650 or so today across a huge range of markets and niches, they comply with the following set of standards.

<ul>

<li> All keyword targeted domains with at least one primary keyword in the URL</li>
<li> All .com TLD's</li>
<li> All hosted on separate c-class ip blocks and ranges (I typically use a combination of reseller accounts and services like seo host from host gator)</li>
<li> All private reg through various registars</li>
<li> No inter linking between any of the domains what so ever</li>
<li> No black hat stuff (I use another batch of a few hundred site for that stuff)</li>
</ul>

Bottom line is my sites that use quality incoming links with highly targeted anchor text from category and thematically relevant pages have been staying around and pushing substantial link juice domain wide ( in case your wondering, specific rel=no follow still do work if used in the right way with your internal linking strategy )

These site have also seen very strong SERP increases with very competitive terms as more and more spammy sites and links are being de-indexed.

Lower quality links have been getting culled at a much higher rate than usual, we also do not have any increased googlebot activity on our servers, so this has nothing to do with links being followed, it has everything to do with google evaluations after spider crawls. (The Algo Effect)

To put this in context a very big client of mine has had over 50K links culled and discounted since the middle of November, ( Those links were there long before I came on board to handle the SEO ) Every one of those links were weak and it was a combination of those domains just being de-indexed and simply no longer counted.

A linking pages PR ( notice I said linking page not linking domain ) has less and less to do with overall value transfer, and it really is becoming apparent that PR really is only one aspect of the link metric evaluation today.


It also seems clear non content domain external links are becoming more and more dampened, especially if the link is site wide / on the homepage or in the footer and sidebar to a slightly lesser extent.

Bottom line, The engines and obviously I am really only talking about Google here are putting much more weight on in-body keyword targeted content links.

Also remember google will only count the first link to a URL found in the XHTML per page.


Anyways I have to make a phone call so I will wrap this up.

Bottom line is google wants to see more and more quality authoritative links to your domain and not just your homepage.

Be very careful who and what you link to from your site and use your common sense.

Links / Resources pages are often being looked at as poison-pill words more and more often on your sites and they are hurting you if they exist.

If you do have have them, change it over from text to an image and obviously don't have the alt tag or image path named something like link button, etc....

I don't see googles image OCR really paying all that much attention to that in todays engines, they have much more important things to be focussing on.

Googles Index wide link graph today is so advanced that very few little tricks will work in even the short term moving forward.

In fact if they determine or even think a small domain ( less than 1000 pages ) is playing games there is a very good chance that back to the sandbox the site will go.

There is a long list of people doing the right things today and google is now starting to reward them for it.

Few free to hit me back if you need any further clarification.


Marc

[Davioli]

Most backlink checkers rely on Yahoo siteexplorer to give their data.

Yesterday..or rather for the last 36 hours or so.. Yahoo probably had a glitch in its servers which resulted in around 25% of the total links showing.

For the past few hours though...I'm noticing that the links are back for most websites that I track.

No need to be paranoid.. If its your own websites.. just use Googles own webmaster tools to check your links(you have to be signed up for it though)

[AndyBlackSEO]

Originally Posted by brp002

Well for some people they have a lot of BS links like from forums or blogs. Well if that website goes down then you loose all of your links. So for instance Warrior Forum I use signature for people just to go to my sites but If Warrior forum would go down I would lose 300 links or so. Some people might get worried but no big deal!

Of course. I was tired.. lol.

[MarkAse]

It happened to all of us yesterday. This morning the old link counts are back up.

Another great example of why you do not want to track links over a daily basis.