Why do I have over 3,000 less backlinks compared to last year?

[simpleviewinc]

When I compare the number of backlinks in Open Site Explorer today compared to the same day last year, why do I have 3,000 less?

[NakulGoyal]

This could be for multiple reasons. If you are looking at raw total links (not unique domains) linking to you, one blogger linking to you with a sitewide link and if that person change his blog's link display from sitewide to homepage only can impact numbers like that. Have you also been monitoring your competitor links ? How have they changed ?

Also, the quality of the sites OSE uses it's in index would improve over time, in which case spam blogs etc might get dropped, thereby causing in reduction in the number of links.

There could be a number of things. See OSE Stats below from their update on 9th Oct, 2014

• 166,012,290,869 (166 Billion) URLs
• 14,298,548,989 (14 Billion) subdomains
• 168,560,672 (168 Million) Root Domains
• 836,560,885,910 (836 Billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.51% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 63.17% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 36.83% are external
• Rel Canonical - 19.74% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 105.24 links on it
  • 87.45 internal links on average
  • 17.79 external links on average