Links (external and total) have significantly decreased in 1 month from August to October - why?

[Jenny8675309]

Greetings,

After comparing a few stats in one of my campaigns, I noticed that External Followed Links, Total External Links, and Total Links significantly decreased from August 29th to when I just checked them a few days ago (October 3).

Any ideas on why this happened?

For example, Total External Links went from 50,589 to 39,203.

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Jenny

[kchandler]

Keep in mind if you are pulling these stats from OSE or the pro tool that the amount of domains and URLs differ each time they update the mozscape index. So the total amounts may change depending on the variations from those two months.

Have you noticed this change with your competitors sites as well or is it specific to only our site?

[CMC-SD]

Have you checked the disappearing URLs to see if they're still online?

[Jenny8675309]

Hmm, interesting. I'm new to the pro tool so please forgive this question - but what exactly is the mozscape index and why does it fluctuate?

One competitor went down slightly and another went up, so it seems specific to only our site. So does that indicate a mozscape index fluctuation or something different?

Thanks so much for your help!

[Jenny8675309]

Forgive this newbie response, but how do I check to see which URLs have disappeared? There are over 10,000 Total External Links which disappeared so let me know if there's an easy way to do this please.

[CMC-SD]

How comfortable are you with Excel? Do you know how to use the vlookup function?

[Jenny8675309]

I'm not familiar with the vlookup function. Is it pretty difficult? I'm pretty good at research and picking things up though so if that's the way to go about it I can give it a go.

Thanks so much for your ongoing assistance.

Jenny

[CMC-SD]

I just learned about vlookup this year. Super useful for cross-referencing spreadsheets.

Here's how it works. In the same Excel document, you will have two sheets. The first one will have all the data from your last OSE report, the one with 50K links. (I'm assuming you exported this.) The second sheet will have all the data from your more recent OSE report, the one with 30k links. The vlookup function will quickly check if something on the first sheet is also on the second sheet.

If it's on the first sheet but not on the second sheet, then that's one of the links that "disappeared." Look those over, check for patterns, test some of them. Maybe you had a sitewide link on a giant website, and that website just went down. But if the missing links are still online, then OSE simply didn't crawl them this time.

If you've never used vlookup before, it's worth spending a few hours reading tutorials, watching videos (tons on YouTube!), and learning the syntax. Best of luck!

[CMC-SD]

Can't believe I didn't think of this earlier, but are you comparing the numbers you're getting here to the numbers you're getting from Google Webmaster Tools? Did you also see a drop in backlinks there?

[magicrob]

Yeah this is the first thing you should do. WMT should give you a more exact number of links than OSE, and those numbers don't tend to fluctuate as much - unless there is an actual loss/gain of a larger number of links/LRDs.

[kchandler]

Jenny, here is a full list of post were rand and other SEOMoz associates talk about the updates to the mozscape index (which powers OSE and the pro tools):

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=mozscape+update%3A

In regards to your question of what is mozscape here is another great resource:

http://www.seomoz.org/help/what-is-mozscape

In regards to your last question, it sounds like it was a blend of you losing some links and the mozscape fluctuations. Always take OSE data with a grain of salt, that information is simply to give you insight to trends in your link profile. Did your domain authority drop or stay the same during the changes?

• Kyle

[Jenny8675309]

Kyle,

Thanks again for the ongoing help and information - you rock! Our domain authority stayed the same. I'll definitely check out the links to the resources you provided as well. Thanks again!

Jenny

[Jenny8675309]

I'm still trying to get access to GWT for this client, so will definitely check that out. Good call and thanks!!