A drop in your backlink count is often caused by normal link churn. It doesn’t automatically mean you’ve been penalized or made a mistake.
Your backlinks may decrease for several reasons: pages are deleted, sites disappear, or a tool no longer counts links.
Understanding which causes matter and which don’t keeps you from wasting time on losses that won’t affect your rankings and organic traffic.
Key Takeaways
- Small backlink drops are normal; most sites lose links monthly.
- Worry only about sudden drops tied to specific dates.
- Fix redirects, noindex tags, and disavow files; ignore link rot.
- Send one polite email only when reclaiming an editor’s citation.
- Build steady new links to outpace ordinary monthly backlink churn.
Are Decreasing Backlinks a Problem or Just a Normal Drop?
Decreasing backlinks aren’t always a problem. A backlink count often dips a little every month, and that alone doesn’t mean anything is wrong.
Every link pointing to your site lives on someone else’s page. Those pages can be updated, redesigned, or removed without your involvement.
Site owners delete old posts, redesign sites, and cut outbound links for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
Some of your referring domains, the separate websites that each have at least one link pointing to yours, will always disappear. Link loss like this reflects how the web works.
The New & Lost Referring Domains report shows monthly losses from March to September for brightonseo.com from Semrush’s Referring Domain tool:
You can clearly see regular monthly losses (red bars) alongside new domains (blue bars).
Now look at the site’s Monthly Visits for the same period (March to September) from Semrush’s Website Traffic Checker tool:
Despite ongoing losses in referring domains, traffic remained healthy and even rose sharply toward the end of the period.
Normal churn like this is routine rather than a ranking or traffic problem.
Every link carries different weight. Losing a link from a page with high Domain Rating (DR) hurts more than losing one from a page nobody else links to.
What Is Domain Rating (DR)?
It’s a 0 to 100 score from Ahrefs that estimates how strong a website‘s backlinks are.
Losing five weak links often matters less than losing one strong one. Losing a handful of links most months is ordinary wear rather than a warning sign.
A sudden, much bigger drop, especially one that lines up with a specific date, is a different story worth investigating. Start by ruling out a false alarm: your tools don’t agree with each other, since Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and SEMrush each crawl the web on their own schedule and keep their own index.
That’s why the same website can show three different backlink counts on the same day, and none of the three is wrong.
They’re just looking at the same web through slightly different windows, at slightly different times. Once you’ve ruled out a false alarm, it helps to know what normal link growth looks like, so you can tell a real problem from ordinary fluctuation.
A healthy pace of new links keeps ordinary churn from becoming a real decline.
Check the Right Report Before You Panic
Check reports from Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and Semrush. Open Google Search Console, since it’s free and shows Google’s own view of who links to you.
From there, three checks tell you almost everything:
- In Google Search Console, open Links, then check External Links and Top Linking sites for anything that dropped off.
- In Ahrefs or Semrush, whichever you already use, open the Lost Backlinks report and filter it by reason, not just by date.
- Compare the drop against the last 3 to 6 months rather than just last week, so one slow week doesn’t look like a crisis.
Most people check the wrong report first and scare themselves over nothing. A single tool showing a dip usually just means that tool recrawled a page before another one did.
Three tools agreeing on a real drop is a much stronger signal than one tool showing a scary number.
If you want the full walkthrough beyond these three checks, a full backlink profile audit covers every report worth opening.
The Causes You Can Fix Yourself
Four of the most common causes are things you did, which means you can also undo them.
A Redirect or URL Change Broke the Link
If you’ve changed your site’s URL structure or moved a page without a redirect, the old link now points at nothing.
A 301 redirect tells Google a page moved permanently, and it carries the old page’s links with it to the new address. A redirect checker, or a crawler like Screaming Frog, will show you any old URLs returning an error instead of a redirect.
Your Own Noindex Tag Is Hiding a Linked Page
A noindex tag tells Google to drop a page from its results, and any backlink sitting on that page disappears from your count along with it.
This usually happens by accident, often after a site redesign or a plugin update changes a setting nobody meant to touch.
Check the page directly. If it carries a noindex tag and backlinks pointing to that page, it can drop out of Search Console count along with it.
A Disavow File Took Out More Than the Bad Links
If you’ve ever submitted a disavow file (a list you send Google of links you want it to ignore), an overbroad one can quietly remove trust from links you actually wanted to keep.
A disavow file only strips trust from links you list in it on purpose, and you can easily list more than you intended.
A disavow doesn’t remove those links from your backlink reports in Ahrefs or Semrush. They still appear there. What changes is how Google treats them. It stops counting them toward your site’s authority, so they vanish from Google’s perspective even though the links themselves remain live.
Most sites do better leaving links alone unless one is clearly spammy and clearly hurting rankings.
Before you touch that file again, read why disavowing links often backfires more often than it helps.
Your Own Content Aged Out of Being Worth Citing
Sometimes your page stopped being the best answer, and an editor swapped in something newer.
Content ages. Prices change, companies rename tools, screenshots go stale, and a page that ranked as the best source in 2024 can lose that spot by 2026.
Updating the page, not just the publish date but the actual numbers and examples inside it, is usually enough to earn that citation back.
The Causes That Aren’t Your Fault
Three causes that aren’t your fault: the source page died, the linking domain disappeared entirely, and a low-quality link stopped counting.
The other common causes have nothing to do with anything you did.
The Source Page Died (Link Rot)
Link rot happens when someone deletes or moves the page that linked to you, or the page breaks, and your backlink disappears.
Recent research found that 51.24% of links from 2009-2014 could not be connected to at all, with most failures due to DNS, timeout, and TLS problems rather than simple 404 errors. None of that is a reflection on your site. It’s a reflection on how much of the web quietly disappears every year.
Link rot drains your site’s authority over time, but for now the key is identifying which lost links are worth recovering.
The Linking Domain Disappeared Entirely
Sometimes the whole domain goes away, instead of just the one page. A site owner lets a domain expire, sells the business, or stops paying for hosting, and every link that domain ever gave you goes with it.
There’s nothing to fix here. The domain is gone, and no redirect or email changes that.
A Low-Quality Link Finally Stopped Counting
Some links would never last because weak domains created them. Google or a tool can devalue or drop a link from a thin, spammy, or barely active site without any action from you at all.
As you recover lost links, consider whether any backlinks in your profile are actually harming your rankings. Which toxic backlinks deserve your attention depends on their toxicity score and your site’s current standing.
When Google’s Updates Cause Your Backlinks to Decrease
Google uses spam policies as rules to decide which links and pages it will trust. Google updates these spam policies every so often, and each update can quietly devalue entire categories of links at once.
Google has cracked down on two newer categories: site reputation abuse and scaled content abuse.
Both target links from thin or mass-produced pages rather than a real editor’s judgment. If links vanished on roughly the same date, a policy update is a reasonable guess, especially if the lost links came from similar sites.
You didn’t do anything here either. The site hosting your link caused the problem in Google’s eyes, and that’s outside your control.
How AI-Driven Content Pruning Is Cutting Links in 2026
A newer cause is appearing more frequently in 2026. Sites are deleting or trimming old content to look leaner for AI search, and your link can go down with it.
Publishers are auditing old posts now, removing or merging those pages that no longer drive traffic. Part of the reason is to keep the site lean, given how AI systems crawl and summarize content.
A publisher can fold a page that once linked to you into a newer post, strip its outbound links, or delete it outright. None of it reflects the quality of your page.
This has quietly emerged as one of the more common causes of link loss in 2026, and almost nobody auditing their backlinks yet checks for it specifically.
Treat it the same way you’d treat any other link rot. Check whether the source page still exists before you spend time trying to win it back.
So What Do You Do About It? A 3-Bucket Action Plan
Every cause above falls into one of three buckets:
- Ignore it: The backlink loss is normal or has little impact. You don’t need to take action.
- Fix it yourself: A technical issue or outdated content caused the loss. Fix the problem and wait for Google to recrawl the page.
- Try to recover it once: A valuable editor-placed link disappeared. Send one short, specific email asking whether the editor can restore it.
The table below shows where each cause fits and what you should do next.
| CAUSE |
BUCKET |
WHAT TO DO |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary churn within your normal range |
Ignore | Nothing. Check again next month. |
| Redirect, noindex, or disavow mistake |
Fix it yourself | Correct the technical issue, then wait for a recrawl. |
| Content that aged out of being citable |
Fix it yourself | Update the page with current numbers and examples. |
| Link rot or a disappeared domain |
Ignore, usually | Chase it only if the link was a major referring domain. |
| A weak or toxic link Google devalued |
Ignore | It likely wasn’t earning you much anyway. |
| A real editor removed or swapped your citation |
Worth one attempt | Send a short, polite email asking to be re-added. |
| AI-driven content pruning on the source site |
Worth one attempt | Ask if the link can be added to the replacement post. |
“Worth one attempt” means exactly one attempt. Send a short, specific, polite email once.
In the campaigns Outreach Desk manages, a single-focused link reclamation email gives you a chance to recover a valuable lost link.
You’ll get more value by focusing on important lost links instead of spending time chasing every dead link. Build new links to replace lower-value losses.
If a lost link is worth recovering, recovering lost backlinks shows you how to write a short reclamation email and track the response.
While you’re at it, it’s worth checking whether you can turn mentions into real links, too. Some of what looks like a lost link is actually a mention the site never linked in the first place.
How to Prevent Backlink Losses
The real fix for backlink anxiety isn’t checking less; it’s building enough new links so that ordinary link rot becomes invisible.
A healthy backlink profile often loses links every month. The ones that keep growing anyway are the ones adding new inbound links faster than link rot removes old ones.
That replacement pace has a name, and link velocity benchmarks cover what a healthy one looks like month to month.
Track how many links you replace each month against the links you lose. If your losses keep outpacing what you’re earning back, that’s a link building problem rather than a diagnostic problem.
Talk to Outreach Desk about building new backlinks to replace the ones you’ve lost.
Get Started This Week
Quit guessing about your lost links.
Open Search Console, go to Links > External Links (or your backlinks report) > filter to show your lost links sorted by reason.
You’ve got 15 minutes. Drop each one into a spreadsheet bucket: domain expired, page moved/removed, editorial decision, or unknown. This audit shows you whether you’re dealing with natural churn or a real problem you need to fix.
Concerned About Losing Valuable Backlinks?
Build a steady flow of relevant, high-quality links to replace losses and support consistent SEO growth.
Why are my backlinks decreasing?
Backlinks can decrease when site owners delete linking pages, websites disappear, URLs change, or editors remove existing links. SEO tools can also report different numbers because they crawl and index the web at different times. Your site’s backlink profile can also change as referring domains and individual links come and go.
Should I worry if I lose backlinks?
Not all the time, because losing some backlinks is normal. Websites and pages change over time. Look for a sustained or unusual drop, especially when valuable referring domains disappear, or organic traffic and rankings decline alongside it.
How can I find out which backlinks I lost?
Check Google Search Console under Links, then compare the results with backlink reports from tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush.
A detailed link building report can help you organize those changes alongside referring domains, placements, and other campaign results. Review the lost links over several months instead of judging the change from a single week.
Can I recover a lost backlink?
You can recover many lost backlinks. Identify why each link disappeared first. When editors remove citations or replace articles, reach out with a brief email explaining you’ve updated your page since they first linked. Include the original URL and ask if they’d restore it.
Different templates exist for different scenarios, depending on whether the link was removed, broken, or redirected incorrectly. You can also recover links on your own by fixing broken redirects or updating canonicals.
Can building new backlinks offset the ones I lose?
Building a steady flow of relevant new backlinks can help offset ordinary link churn over time. Focus on earning links that support your website’s authority, relevance, and long-term SEO goals with a reliable link building agency.
How do I prevent backlink losses from hurting my growth?
You cannot prevent every backlink from disappearing. Build a steady flow of relevant, useful links so normal link churn does not create a long-term decline. Monitor important referring domains and investigate unusual losses before they become a bigger issue.
