Disappearing Links Black Hat ?

[Eff-Commerce]

I have seen reports of Black hat spamming with dodgy links but we have another issue with a clients site.  The site had a small number of solid following links about 60 which had been in place for years and in the past few weeks all but those directly under their control have ceased to link.  At the same time a very aggressive competitor has entered their market which is owned by the officers of an SEO company.  Could it be that they have somehow disavowed the links to the site to damage it how do we find out? there are now just 10 following links?

[JordanLowry]

Have your rankings dropped as well ?

[RuthBurrReedy]

The competitor should have no way to disavow links to your client's site. Even if they had somehow managed to disavow the links, the links themselves would still be in place. Have you checked the linking pages? Do they still exist? Can you tell why the links were removed? Do you have a good enough relationship with the owners of any of the linking sites to be able to reach out to them and see if you can get the links put back, or at least see why they were removed?

[Eff-Commerce]

Hi Domain Authority has plumeted and sessions that were running 20% up year on year are now down 50% year on year. There will be other factors but this is indicative.

[Eff-Commerce]

The links are all pretty historic so there is no direct relationship and but we do not have a record of what the links were for this site.

Peter

[RuthBurrReedy]

I would recommend taking a look at your historical referral data, to see what sites have sent traffic to this site historically that aren't anymore - that will give you an idea of where the links were that went away. Even if you can't get the old link back, you may be able to form a new relationship with those sites' owners, which could result in future link opportunities.

It sounds like, whatever the cause, the site has had a bunch of inbound links to it disappear. This is frustrating, but without knowing where the specific links were, it's going to be hard to get them back. I would focus on getting some new, high-quality, high-authority links to the site. Since you've got this new aggressive competitor, you could use Open Site Explorer to see where they're getting links from, and see if any of the sites that link to them would be good candidates for link outreach from your team as well.

[MattRoney]

I'd like to add that there's a lovely Moz Academy video that covers this sort of competitive link analysis.