Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Ahrefs - What Causes a Drastic Loss in Referring Pages?
-
While I was doing research on UK Flower companies I noticed that one particular domain had great rankings (top 3), but has slid quite a bit down to page two. After investigating further I noticed that they had a drastic loss of referring pages, but an increase in total referring domains. See this screenshot from ahrefs.
I took a look at their historical rankings (got them from the original SEO provider's portfolio) and compared it to the Wayback Machine. There did not seem to be any drastic changes in the site structure. My question is what would cause such a dramatic loss in total referring pages while showing a dramatic increase in referring domains? It appears that the SEO company was trying rebound from the loss of links though.
Any thoughts on why this might happen?
-
The Google Disavow tool doesn't work like that. It won't actually remove links from any pages. It is basically just a signal to Google that you want those links to be nofollowed. Ahrefs would have no clue if something has been disavowed or not.
-
Hi,
One thing that comes to mind is using the Disavow tool. The UK Flower company might have used the Disavow tool to remove all the referring pages that they thought were spam.
-
First thing that comes to mind is maybe the site had a lot of site-wide links before. If it had 5,000 or 10,000 links coming from 1 single domain and that website went down, that would be a huge loss of referring pages in a short amount of time. Maybe they were in web directories and asked to be removed? While simultaneously attempting to build some high quality backlinks from more referring pages?
It's all speculation of course, but plausible.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How often should I update the content on my pages?
I have started dropping on my rankings - due to lack of time after having a baby. I'm still managing to blog but I'm wondering if I update the content on my pages will that help? All my Meta tags and page descriptions were updated over a year ago - do I need to update these too? We were ranking in the top spots for a good few years, but we're slowly falling 😞 Please give me any advice to keep us from falling even further. I have claimed all my listings, and try to add new links once a month. I share my blog to all social sites and work hard to get Google reviews, we have 53 which is higher than any of our competitors. Any other ideas? Have I missed something that Google is looking for nowadays? Many thanks 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | Lauren16890 -
A page will not be indexed if published without linking from anywhere?
Hi all, I have noticed one page from our competitors' website which has been hardly linked from one internal page. I just would like to know if the page not linked anywhere get indexed by Google or not? Will it be found by Google? What if a page not linked internally but go some backlinks from other websites? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Sitemaps for landing pages
Good morning MOZ Community, We've been doing some re-vamping recently on our primary sitemap, and it's currently being reindexed by the search engines. We have also been developing landing pages, both for SEO and SEM. Specifically for SEO, the pages are focused on specific, long-tail search terms for a number of our niche areas of focus. Should I, or do I need to be considering a separate sitemap for these? Everything I have read about sitemaps simply indicates that if a site has over 50 thousand pages or so, then you need to split a sitemap. Do I need to worry about a sitemap for landing pages? Or simply add them to our primary sitemap? Thanks in advance for your insights and advice.
Algorithm Updates | | bwaller0 -
Should my canonical tags point to the category page or the filter result page?
Hi Moz, I'm working on an ecommerce site with categories, filter options, and sort options – teacherexpress.scholastic.com. Should I have canonical tags from all filter and sort options point to the category page like gap.com and llbean.com? or have all sort options point to the filtered page URL like kohls.com? I was under the impression that to use a canonical tag, the pages have to have the same content, meaning that Gap and L.L. Bean would be using canonical tags incorrectly. Using a filter changes the content, whereas using a sort option just changes the order. What would be the best way to deal with duplicate content for this site? Thanks for reading!
Algorithm Updates | | DA20130 -
How to content marketing: Should my blog posts link to my sales page?
Hi, I've been doing a weekly blog making sure that each blog post contains my money keywords in the text, sometimes in h2 tags etc. My blog posts never contain any links to my actual sales page. Should I link each blog post to my sale page or is it overdoing it? Will internal linking of all my blog posts to my sales page will improve its page authority or have any SEO benefits? What about using exact match anchor text on these internal links? I couldn't find any resource online about this matter. Thank you for your opinion and help! -Marc
Algorithm Updates | | marcandre0 -
Why has my homepage been replaced in Google by my Facebook page?
Hi. I was wondering if others have had this happen to them. Lately, I've noticed that on a couple of my sites the homepage no longer appears in the Google SERP. Instead, a Facebook page I've created appears in the position the homepage used to get. My subpages still get listed in Google--just not the homepage. Obviously, I'd prefer that both the homepage and Facebook page appear. Any thoughts on what's going on? Thanks for your help!
Algorithm Updates | | TuxedoCat0 -
Does google index non-public pages ie. members logged in page
hi, I was trying to locate resources on the topics regarding how much the google bot indexes in order to qualify a 'good' site on their engine. For example, our site has many pages that are associated with logged in users and not available to the public until they acquire a login username and password. Although those pages show up in google analytics, they should not be made public in the google index which is what happens. In light of Google trying to qualify a site according to how 'engaged' a user is on the site, I would feel that the activities on those member pages are very important. Can anyone offer suggestions on how Google treats those pages since we are planning to do further SEO optimization of those pages. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | jumpdates0 -
Using Brand Name in Page titles
Is it a good practice to append our brand name at the end of every page title? We have a very strong brand name but it is also long. Right now what we are doing is saying: Product Name | Long brand name here Product Category | Long brand name here Is this the right way to do it or should we just be going with ONLY the product and category names in our page titles? Right now we often exceed the 70 character recommendation limit.
Algorithm Updates | | mlentner1