Why am I seeing this in ahrefs?

[MarieHaynes]

I'm working on diagnosing the reason for a traffic drop for a site.  When I look at the referring domains report in ahrefs I see a huge drop in the number of referring domains that happens exactly on the day of the traffic drop.  However, when I look at the new/lost backlinks report there is no coinciding loss in links.

How is this possible?

[danatanseo]

Hi Marie,

I saw the same thing yesterday and it seemed odd that the drop was consistent across three totally unrelated websites. I dug a little deaper and discovered in the Ahrefs blog that they have recently updated their algorithm. They did put the text "Old Index" in the background of the chart, but that really didn't mean anything to me until I read their blog post here: http://ahrefs.com/news/

Hope that helps! I hope their new index is really better and not just different

Dana

[RyanKent]

Thanks for sharing Dana!

[MarieHaynes]

Well, I'll be darned!  I put in a bunch of other websites and every one has a huge drop on November 27th.  You're right...it's an ahrefs thing and not related to the site I am working on.

How weird that the ahref's drop across the board happened on the exact same day as this site's traffic drop!

I can explain most of what is going on with the site but could not explain a loss of several hundred domains linking to them.  Dana...you saved my sanity tonight!

[danatanseo]

You are very welcome!

[danatanseo]

I'm happy to help Marie. Yes, when I first saw it I was looking at a competitor and I yelled "yes!!!" and then I looked up my own sites and I yelled "nooo!!!" And then I realized something else was going on, LOL. Have a great weekend!