Hi friends! It's the summer of 2018, and many states are experiencing unusually high temperatures. Guess what? Your inbound link volumes may also be hitting unusual heights.
If you track your inbound link volume and/or MozRank, you may have noticed some odd data around the beginning of May. Inbound links went WAY up, and your MozRank may have seen a correlated decline.
You didn't change anything, and you don't think there was any weird activity going on around that time. So what happened? Turns out Moz made some big changes in how they track inbound links!
SOLVED: Moz Links / Link Explorer Update = Massive Increase in Inbound Links
Around the beginning of May, there were very unusual spikes and dips for some of my accounts, and less drastic movement for other accounts. Here's what it looks like:
LARGE INBOUND LINK INCREASE WITH MOZRANK DECREASE:
LARGE INBOUND LINK INCREASE WITH NO MOZRANK DECREASE:
If you only review this data in HubSpot, you may not be up to date on Moz changes. Rand Fishkin gives a full overview of the changes here. These changes affect not only the data you're actively researching, but the data that you're seeing in ongoing reports like in HubSpot or Moz campaigns.
How does Moz's Links update affect my website and data?
Technically, the update doesn't affect your website all that much. Since more link data is pulled from ALL sources - good and bad - it may seem like your website's health has suddenly gone down the drain. But it's simply providing more accurate data for existing links.
Link Explorer has got a giant index. Frankly, it's about 20 times larger than what Open Site Explorer had... just in the last 90 days, which I think is our index — maybe it's a little shorter than that, 60 days — [Link Explorer had] 4.7 trillion, so almost 5 trillion URLs...
The old [Domain Authority] was an old model on old data on an old, tiny index. The new one is based on this 4.7 trillion size index. It is much bigger. It is much fresher. It is much more accurate.
- Rand Fishkin, Moz co-founder
How to get rid of spammy & irrelevant links: Disavow backlinks
That being said, you should act on the updated data if you see a drop in your MozRank or Domain Authority. It will improve your overall SEO health.
If you're seeing a bunch of new spammy, irrelevant domains in your list of inbound links, you can use Google's disavow tool to get back on track.
That's all, folks! Thanks for reading!
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