Number of sites linking to mine is shrinking. WTF?

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I have the Alexa toolbar.  I know they sort of suck, but I don’t want to pay for Google Analytics, which I know is a lot more accurate.  Still, there’s something worrying me.   A few months ago, I had 70+ sites linking into mine.   Over time, I’ve been losing sites linking in to this one.  Last week I was down to 59.  I just looked today and now there are just 50!

I don’t get it.   Are these websites just fly by night ones that no longer exist, or are some sites deciding this site isn’t a good one to link to?   I have no way of finding out what sites have de-linked to mine without paying for more advanced analytics (if I wanted that I would use Google).

Anyone else have this problem and is it something I should worry about?

 

10 thoughts on “Number of sites linking to mine is shrinking. WTF?”

  2. Do you support their sites. Maybe drop in and comment? What sorts of sites were they? If they’re blogs, reciprocity might be the issue.

    You deal with a hard topic as well. Easy to say something they don’t agree with.

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  3. I wish I understood the whole process better, really. It’s funny because there’s some blogs that will have 2 words written, and have like a thousand people…and, then some where they have very little…lol…It actually makes me smile because it’s weird…:-)

    Liked by 1 person

  4. My suspicion is that Alexa’s numbers are not 100% accurate and their algorithms are constantly evolving. Google might see something different, even a different trend, and your rankings might not be affected.

    I do think it’s also possible that some of your audience may have given up on their blogs & links may have disappeared that way.

    Internet metrics are not an exact science. I do keyword research & other analytics using different tools, and the same metrics can vary substantially from company to company; usually they are in the same ballpark.

    btw- Google Analytics is 100% free, it’s just really difficult / unintuitive to set up properly and understand. Clicky has a good free version of analytics that filters out all the garbage and is quite intuitive, but MIGHT not be better than your WordPress.com analytics- I’m not sure what they give you. The best backlink tool is called AHREFS, it’s quite expensive.

    This won’t answer your question, but you can use Moz’s Open Site Explorer to check the backlink profile of your individual pages & posts- you just have to do each URL one at a time. It’s free:

    https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/

    If you ever really want to drill down & understand this stuff, and figure out how to rank in Google, increase traffic, etc- I recommend my friend Brian’s blog, he is really smart and understands this stuff- he won’t steer you wrong:

    https://woorkup.com/

    Liked by 3 people

  5. Just a thought- I learned from my computer literate sons, that from time to time, sites (YouTube for example), eliminate users who appear to have gone completely inactive. “Cleaning up”. My sons have commented about YouTube channels having “x” number of subscribers one day, the considerably less within days.

    Liked by 1 person

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