Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the great input. I think we have figured out the issue, at least partially. This particular client had a Google+ page that they had kept up for several years - lots of posts with links back to the website. That G+ page was deleted this past week, which would explain the sudden disappearance of links. I doubt the page was accountable for 4,000+ links, but I'm pretty confident that is where the majority of the decrease came from. Thanks for the help!

After the latest crawl of one of my client campaigns in Moz, I noticed that their domain authority dropped by 3 since the last crawl just one week ago. That seems pretty drastic. I took a look around to see what might have been the cause, and in looking at the Links > Competitive Metrics > History section of Moz, I found that the site had a decrease of total links from 5,339 to 1,072 (see image) - also a drastic decrease. My question is, what would cause such a huge, sudden decrease in links over just the course of one month? I haven't changed anything up with the approach to their online strategy, in fact we have put increased emphasis on the creation of natural links so this huge decrease comes as a real surprise. I should also mention that Total External Links also decreased, but only from 243 to 205. Any insight into these numbers and what could have possibly caused such a drastic decrease would be very much appreciated!

Screen-Shot-2014-07-23-at-10.00.28-AM.png

Jonathan - I would suggest doing the same thing that Lesley mentioned in order to make sure that you are only disavowing the spam links. You might also want to try dealing with the spammer directly, if possible.

If the links are coming primarily from the same source, you might be able to resolve the issue directly with the spammer. That might be far fetched, but we had a recent issue with spam links on a small scale, from a disgruntled customer of one of our clients. Unfortunately the customer never expressed any frustration to the client, and instead started posting negative reviews, links with negative anchor text, etc. We were actually able to contact the spammer directly, resolve their frustration with the client's product and the spammer actually started doing the complete opposite - changed negative reviews to positive, and it ended better than we could have anticipated.

This might not work for your particular situation, but just thought I would share.

Hi Megan! Any word on when this will be released?

I have had the same issue with several clients. Each of those that I have had problems with have been businesses with a ton of listings out there, many of which had old addresses, phone numbers and website addresses. I have one I'm struggling with currently that has two G+ local pages, one that has all of the correct info and an old, outdated listing that I can't seem to get removed that has incorrect info. Moz Local keeps picking up the old listing and trying to base the validation info off of that, despite the fact that they have a verified up-to-date G+ local listing and Facebook Places page.

Could be the same case with yours. That's the only thing that I can think of.

I've been doing SEO for a little over 4 years. I've never used sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, etc. either personally or on behalf of my clients. This past week I had a discussion with another SEO who asked what I'm doing for my clients with regard to social bookmarking. I responded that I'm really not doing anything and they were shocked. I took a pretty good verbal beating over it. She was borderline offended.

I have always been able to deliver solid results for my clients without any type of social bookmarking, so I struggle to see the need, but am surprised at how shocked this other SEO was that I don't do it. How beneficial is it and am I really missing out?

Tim,

I'm glad you raised that issue. I'm in a very similar situation to you and have had the same question. I have also had calls from random companies that saw my business name in the footer of a site and ended up calling for info. I would hate to have missed out on those new clients, or at the very least the branding opportunity, by not having the footer links on my clients' sites.

In my opinion I think you're spot-on with the no-follow option. I haven't implemented that yet, but will likely put that on the to-do list.

Cole - I haven't checked yet today, but as of yesterday afternoon our March reports weren't available either. I would guess it's just a matter of time until they are available, but like Robert mentioned, support@moz.com is probably your best option to get specific help on that.

If my reports aren't available soon, then I will shoot them an email on the topic as well.