Why the sudden link drop?

[EcommerceSite]

How do I find out in WMT if they were internal or external? Three things in WMT that seem like problems. End of December have about 250k indexed pages. The following week we have 80k. Mid November we have about 3k not found now we have 225k not found. For the sitemap we have about 18k submitted and only 9k indexed.

[ChadBreezy]

Google should let you click on the pages that are showing 404 or soft404. You can see the location and do a little research yourself. Chances are you/your organization might have deleted some pages by accident or your cms system is could be jacked up. 404s are a very bad thing for your website and organic traffic.

[EcommerceSite]

I used screaming from and didn't see any duplicates. All status codes were 200. What else should I be looking for?

[EcommerceSite]

I am showing no soft 404s and no server errors. Where would I see the 404s? We actually don't use cms we had a site custom built.

[EcommerceSite]

I am showing no soft 404s and no server errors. Where would I see the 404s? We actually don't use cms we had a site custom built.

[ChadBreezy]

Did you see my response above about Google reporting the 404/soft404s that are missing pages. This could be CMS related. What CMS system are you using?

[ChadBreezy]

I would consider what Irving mentioned above. It's time to do a link audit using a power tool like Majestic SEO. You could had a huge link partner disco from your website. This affect can drop a bomb on your website if your problem is indeed external.

[EcommerceSite]

I am not showing any link spam but I did use ahrefs and a few things came up. We lost 90 backlinks in one day at the end of November. Overal in two months we have gone from 1800 backlinks to 1600. At the end of December we had 380 referring domains and it dropped to 227 in one day, not back up to 330.

[ChadBreezy]

This is in stride to what Iriving mentioned. I am not sure of your website's goal or potential, but that is a very alarming drop. Do you know who is linking to you direct; meaning do you have relationship? If not I would try to contact them for an answer why. I mean they could have adjusted their SEO strategy. Maybe the links were site-wide links and they could have changed a design or template that removed your link. Or again, they may have decided to just drop your link and if it was site wide on many of the websites, this would be a close answer to the sudden loss of backlinks and pages that loose rankings in Google's SERP.

[EcommerceSite]

We have no direct relationships with anyone. Every link we got just appeared, nobody made an effort to get any. We didn't have a lot of great links anyway. We never had an SEO strategy. We used out of the box software for a decade. Than in Early November we launched a redesigned site and got killed organically. I don't think anyone made a decision to drop us as a link because we never had a strategy and to be honest didn't have that great of links with the few we did have. I will run Majestic now and see what it shows. I really think this is something on our end. We had great developers, but they don't know a lot about seo.

[ChadBreezy]

Now hearing more about your situation. I found the answer. When there is a site redesign, sometimes pages can get lost in translation. I had this happened with Leads do com project that I worked on and saw something similar that was going to happen until I spoke and made sure proper 301 for old pages were set to go to the new locations.

This is really important, can you double check to see if this was done properly. If those pages were somehow lost it would be a large contributing factor in the lose of page rank juice, rankings, and overall traffic.

[EcommerceSite]

The 301s were not right, but we fixed 99% of them in early December. I did double check them this week. Not sure what else to look for.

[Guest]

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