Why the sudden link drop?

[EcommerceSite]

A the end of November I am showing that our total links were 118k. Current links are 22k. We changed sites early November so that was about three weeks before. What would cause the drop of about 100k links? Or where should I start investigating?

[irvingw]

when u changed sites did you 301 redirect all of the old URLs to the new URLs? if not then those links pointing to your site are 404'ing and got dropped.

[ChadBreezy]

These links were probably diluted by the late and famous Google Penguin Algorithm. This algorithm was targeted at websites that have over optimized link building. This including using the same anchor text over and over.

Use Majestic SEO or Ahrefs to look at the link profile.

You can certainly do an audit on your links and determine if you have enough resources to go through a disavow process.

I would focus on instead setting a budge for quality directory submissions using branded keywords and or press releases for new content your website produces.

*Also avoid doing too much link building in a 0 to 90 period. You just don't need as many links anymore!

This should help you move forward.

[ChadBreezy]

Yea check this too; great answer here. I just don't know why people are doing this without 301 in a .htaccess file to new location. But it's hard to tell if the poster is having problems internally or externally?!

[EcommerceSite]

Originally they were all 302s, we had that changed to 301s. in mid December. We started to see improvement after that though. We never had anyone attempt to linkbuild though so I have no idea how we even had 118k links, a lot must have been internal. Organic traffic is down quite a bit though so there is some sort of problem.

[irvingw]

find out if they were internal or external you can see that in WMT

if internal it's probably a reflection of different site navigation and number of links on your pages (and number of paged)

if external it's 404'ing links (make sure you are 301'ing everything important) or links getting devalued or dropped by sites. Sometimes a site can be linking to you 200,000 times and then remove your links overnight.

[ChadBreezy]

Did many of those pages have duplicate content problems. Do a quick audit on the website using "Screaming Frog". It's free to use and is fast. You can also export csv reports and study in excel. Let me know what you find!

[EcommerceSite]

We have never had a link building campaign or paid for a single link. Even if they were diluted, wouldn't they still show up in open site?

[ChadBreezy]

Try to use Majestic SEO or Ahrefs. Ahrefs will sample for you for free. Majestic SEO is a monster tool you can use but cost! Just try to do link profile study just to see if there is link spam associated with your website. Just curious!

The only idea here for sudden loss in rankings or links is related to duplicate content, 404s, soft 404s, aka broken links to pages or deleted pages that were once ranked/cached with Google.

Hope this makes sense.

[EcommerceSite]

How do I find out in WMT if they were internal or external? Three things in WMT that seem like problems. End of December have about 250k indexed pages. The following week we have 80k. Mid November we have about 3k not found now we have 225k not found. For the sitemap we have about 18k submitted and only 9k indexed.

[ChadBreezy]

Google should let you click on the pages that are showing 404 or soft404. You can see the location and do a little research yourself. Chances are you/your organization might have deleted some pages by accident or your cms system is could be jacked up. 404s are a very bad thing for your website and organic traffic.

[EcommerceSite]

I used screaming from and didn't see any duplicates. All status codes were 200. What else should I be looking for?

[EcommerceSite]

I am showing no soft 404s and no server errors. Where would I see the 404s? We actually don't use cms we had a site custom built.

[EcommerceSite]

I am showing no soft 404s and no server errors. Where would I see the 404s? We actually don't use cms we had a site custom built.

[ChadBreezy]

Did you see my response above about Google reporting the 404/soft404s that are missing pages. This could be CMS related. What CMS system are you using?

[ChadBreezy]

I would consider what Irving mentioned above. It's time to do a link audit using a power tool like Majestic SEO. You could had a huge link partner disco from your website. This affect can drop a bomb on your website if your problem is indeed external.

[EcommerceSite]

I am not showing any link spam but I did use ahrefs and a few things came up. We lost 90 backlinks in one day at the end of November. Overal in two months we have gone from 1800 backlinks to 1600. At the end of December we had 380 referring domains and it dropped to 227 in one day, not back up to 330.

[ChadBreezy]

This is in stride to what Iriving mentioned. I am not sure of your website's goal or potential, but that is a very alarming drop. Do you know who is linking to you direct; meaning do you have relationship? If not I would try to contact them for an answer why. I mean they could have adjusted their SEO strategy. Maybe the links were site-wide links and they could have changed a design or template that removed your link. Or again, they may have decided to just drop your link and if it was site wide on many of the websites, this would be a close answer to the sudden loss of backlinks and pages that loose rankings in Google's SERP.

[EcommerceSite]

We have no direct relationships with anyone. Every link we got just appeared, nobody made an effort to get any. We didn't have a lot of great links anyway. We never had an SEO strategy. We used out of the box software for a decade. Than in Early November we launched a redesigned site and got killed organically. I don't think anyone made a decision to drop us as a link because we never had a strategy and to be honest didn't have that great of links with the few we did have. I will run Majestic now and see what it shows. I really think this is something on our end. We had great developers, but they don't know a lot about seo.

[ChadBreezy]

Now hearing more about your situation. I found the answer. When there is a site redesign, sometimes pages can get lost in translation. I had this happened with Leads do com project that I worked on and saw something similar that was going to happen until I spoke and made sure proper 301 for old pages were set to go to the new locations.

This is really important, can you double check to see if this was done properly. If those pages were somehow lost it would be a large contributing factor in the lose of page rank juice, rankings, and overall traffic.