The start of every month is either a time for celebrated accomplishment or perplexed head scratching. I never know what it will bring me. That’s because the start of every month is when I perform link audits. I check to see what progress (or lack thereof) has been made for the past 30 days. But I’ve noticed one consistent trend over the past 60 – 90 days. Links are dropping. And primarily to the home page of sites that I’m monitoring.
Why is this happening? There are any number of explanations including the following:
1. The tool is not 100% accurate. Search engines are notorious for not telling you the whole story.
2. It’s the natural ebb and flow of link development. If there is anything consistent about link building, it’s the fact that the numbers are inconsistent. That’s just how it happens. Links don’t get crawled (or reported), pages (and whole sites) disappear, and search engines update their indices.
3. Search engines are getting selective of what links are worthy of being reported. With SEs constantly updating their algorithms to deliver the best results possible, they quite often evaluate how their weighing individual elements, such as links, that play into rankings.
All of these are very plausible explanations. More often than not, I have found an entirely different culprit at work:
Site wide links.
Also knows as run-of-site links, these links typically reside in the global footer of a Web site and link back to another site. The three telling tales that a group of links are site wide links are:
- All the links come from one domain
- All the links go to one desination page (typically the home page)
- All the links have identical anchor text (typically the brand / site name)
To test and see if a site wide link is dragging down your overall link popularity metric, watch the link popularity of your site and compare it to the pages being indexed of the site linking to yours. If the pages indexed increase, or remain relatively stable, and your link popularity continues to drop, the site wide link is most likely at fault. To be sure, you should focus your measurement just on the page that the link(s) are pointing to.
Is this something to care about? Possibly. Something to panic about? Probably not. The reason for that is because like I said earlier, these links typically have the brand name or site name as their anchor text. If you’ve done a good job optimizing your site, you should already be showing up number one for your brand. If not, you probably have more issues than a site wide link.
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