What could have caused Total links to drop from 860,000 to 93,127 in Open Site Explorer?

[sixspokemedia]

I've been monitoring root domain total links for a website over the past couple of months and recently noticed a significant drop at the beginning of July.Specifically, I have been tracking the total links for the root domain using open site explorer. Since April the total number or links has been fluctuating among 860,000 - 865,000. However at the beginning of July, they dropped to 93,127 and now sit only at 110,831.This is a very significant and troubling decrease and I am wondering what the cause could be? Did Moz change the way they report/determine the total link metrics? It is especially baffling since neither total internal nor total external links have seen significant decreases.

[LesleyPaone]

Do you remember any of the sites / pages that were being linked to? Are they still there? It could be a natural thing, or it could be an index issue with Moz. Once I had posted a comment on a site and it was considered a top comment, so they kept it in the side bar of their site for like 2 months. Their site had like 30k pages. You might be having an issue like that. Is the number of linking domains down also by a lot, or is it just the number of links? Because a site could have re-factored how they do things in relation to duplicate content, then when Moz crawled it, it is not picking up all of the links from the site.

[ErinMcCaul]

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! My name is Erin, and I'm on the Moz Help Team. This is a tricky thing to troubleshoot since we don't have a historical database for our Index, and to my knowledge we haven't changed anything about the way we gather/report this information. Sorry I can't do more for you on the support side with this one! While I can tell you how we gather the data, ideas as to why a drop like this would occur is outside of my scope of expertise.

Presashop might have a good starting point for your investigation though! I'll leave this questions as "unanswered" on my side so more folks from the community can chime in if they have any other insights.

Good Luck, and Happy Tuesday!

Erin