Linking Domains in Open Site Explorer Report No Longer Exist. Help.

[-Al-]

Hello to all,

I have a number of Linking Domains on our Open Site Explorer Report that no longer exist.

I've run URL checks on just a sample of the list, and found that approx. 35% of that sample are from now dead Linking Domains.

Can someone help? If these Linking Domains are defunct, how can I remove these? Does Google reflect negatively on these dead Linking Domains in our SERPs?

Has anyone experienced this before? What action did you take?

[Audiohype]

I think it may be the case that open site explorer will update when it discovers the links no longer exist. How long ago did they expire?

35% of your backlinks dropping seems like quite a big chunk. Is there a common cause for these domains expiring? If they all dropped off quite recently I would image there would be some fluctuation in terms of rankings

[-Al-]

Ben - The 35% was taken from a small sample, I'm guessing that the actual figure will be much lower. However, it's still worrying.

I'm not too sure when the domains expired, or whether there is a common cause, I'll have to do some more digging on that front. I suppose the more pressing issue is that we do remove them if they are having a negative impact on our rankings.

Are you saying the linking domains will simply fall off once opensite discover they no longer exist?

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! These domains that no longer have links to a site should drop off the report in a couple of crawl cycles. Our data isn't live, but can take a few weeks to crawl, process, and display. I suggest re-running your report, since we just pushed out a new index yesterday, and seeing if anything looks better. You can also look to see what Google and Bing report in their webmaster tools for your website.

[Audiohype]

This is the case as far as I'm aware, and Keri seems to have confirmed it below.

Chances are that Google has already taken note of some of the links so I would imagine you will be seeing changes over the next few weeks / months as it finds out these links no longer exist.

If the domains have expired, removing them isn't something you can do as they already don't exist.