Half of my backlinks just disappeared!

[CaliB]

I was just starting to feel like I was getting traction and all of a sudden half of our external backlinks just disappeared! Over the past 4 months we've taken our total external links from about 2500 to 6500 and with the lastest report, we seem to have lost more than half and are now around 2100. Our domain authority has dropped accordingly too.  I realize that backlinks aren't forever but what in the heck could cause you to loose over 4000 in a one month period?

eK9w

[David_H]

If you are using Open Site Explorer to check your links, after the last update you'd be expecting to see fewer than before.

See the post Rand made on this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/july-mozscape-update

This might not account for all you are not seeing, but would explain some.

[CaliB]

I'm learning that SEOMOZ isn't google, but they are doing their best to see the web like Google does. I think it's still the best SEO tool out there, just have to remember to not take SEOMOZ's numbers too literally. Ultimately it's about Google ranking and as long as I don't see a big slip there, I shouldn't get too worried. Happy Friday all!

[KeriMorgret]

You've got the right approach there. We do our best to look at the web like Google does, but we don't have quite the resources they do. We do have to make tradeoffs between getting an index out in a more timely manner and getting one out that has a lot of data. The bigger we go, the more problems we run in to. This last index was about half the size of the previous index, which would account for much of that drop. So sorry to scare you!