Domain Moztrust

[EcomLkwd]

While looking over my historical rankings for MozTrust I noticed a very large drop in my rankings (5 to 4) on July 2013 that never picked up again.

What would cause this?

[Davenport-Tractor]

Rachel,

Ready for some bad news? It means that the spiders crawling your site have found links to your site that are from low quality (trust) sites. Hence if you have low quality sites providing links to your site it could bring down your trust.

We both hope that these are not your doing. What that means is that just going out and soliciting links to your site, without first checking out the domain trust, content, and page rank of the site you are trying to receive a link from, you may just be asking for trouble by accepting just any old link.

So if that inset bad enough here is even worse news! Rouge websites could possibly provide a link to your site just to do evil deeds to your site. Its worth checking into where the links to your site come from. Here is where the link disavow comes into play.

I am not saying that is what happen in your case, so please check it out instead of ignoring it, and hoping things will improve in the future.

Wish I had better news for you,

[EcomLkwd]

Thanks for giving me a clear answer.

There hasn't been any spammy links added to our backlink profile recently, does that mean that these bad links could be a few years old?

[Dubs]

It is possible that the links were created a while back and just recently discovered by Google.

[Davenport-Tractor]

Rachel Johnson

The links may be difficult to find with just a cursory look. We use a service called LinkDetox. It is a charge for service but you would be surprised at who links to you! There are lots of these types of services so LinkDetox may not be your first choice. But they will provide a report of the good links along with the cautionary links, as well the bad links. I just bet you will find bad links that you are not seeing by using GWMT or a MOZ links report.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Rachel,

Could mean one of several things:

1. You lost high-trust links (or the sites linking to you lost trust)
2. You gained low-trust links
3. The algorithm is a comparative metric (based against all the other sites on the web) so it's possible you simply experienced a readjustment of a relative measurement, and nothing really happened with your links

It's probably not much to worry about, unless you notice a drop in rankings, been hit by a penalty, or suspect a rash of negative links. In these cases further investigation may be warranted, but otherwise you'll probably be okay as long as you notice your traffic remaining steady.

Cheers.