Case study · SEO·Ecommerce
The links went up every month, and the traffic went down.
This site was losing 21,000 keywords and 67,000 visits every 30 days. In those same thirty days the backlink count rose by 5,900 and referring domains by 376. Somebody was working and reporting numbers that went up, while the site fell underneath them.
4,300
keywords in the top three
was 777
What we found
The numbers going up were not the numbers that mattered
One board held two opposite trends. Backlinks +5,900 and referring domains +376 over the last 30 days. And across the same thirty days: keywords down 21,000, traffic down 67,400, top-three rankings down 634, and Domain Rating down six points. A monthly report that says we built links is literally true, and completely detached from what is happening to the site.
The two trends
Links rising · rankings falling
When both happen in the same month, the problem is not the number of links, and more of them will not fix it.
Why link building was not stopping the bleed
A link adds strength to the whole site. It does not return one page that lost its position. If a page dropped because something changed on it, or on the pages competing with it, new links to the domain never touch the cause. The money goes out, and the page keeps falling.
The number that was reported, and the one that was not
The report carried the count of new links, and that number rises every month whatever happens. The number that tells the truth is how many keywords sit in the top three, and that one fell by 634 in a single month. Both were on the same board.
And why this runs for months without anyone stopping it
Because whoever reads the report sees a number going up and is reassured. One question ends it: is traffic rising or falling in that same month? If the report does not put the two figures side by side, that question never gets asked.
The work
What changed between the two boards
Rankings improved and referring domains came down. That is not an accident, it was the point: stop spending on what is not moving the outcome, and find out why the site is falling first.
What we did
- Stopped link building until we knew why rankings were falling, rather than adding to a problem that was not yet diagnosed
- Reviewed the referring domains: down from 2,500 to 2,000, while Domain Rating rose from 36 to 40
- Grew keyword coverage from 54,900 to 102,000, built on real search intent rather than volume
- Worked on the pages that were losing position, so the top three went to 4,300 from 777
What we refused
- We did not add links to make the report look better, when the report already looked better than the site was doing
- We did not promise a date, because the site was still falling on the day we took it on
- We did not use the word penalty: nothing in the boards pointed to a manual action, the site was simply losing rankings
- We did not measure ourselves by referring domains, because that is the number that went down
The boards, before and after
The images come straight from Ahrefs. The site name and domain are withheld by agreement with the client, and everything else is untouched. Look at the small figure beside each large one in the first image: that is the one telling you the direction.
- Keywords ranking
- 54,900102,000
- Keywords in the top three
- 7774,300
- Domain Rating
- 3640
- Referring domains
- 2,5002,000
54.9K keywords (down 21K) · 220K traffic (down 67.4K) · top three 777 (down 634) · DR 36 (down 6)
102K keywords · top three 4,300 · DR 40 · referring domains 2K
Source: Ahrefs Site Explorer
Run it on your own site
How to tell whether this is happening to you now
These three take five minutes and you can run them yourself without talking to anybody.
01
Put the two numbers side by side
Open any link tool and look at the last 30 days: referring domains and keywords in the top three. If the first is rising while the second falls, you are in the same position.
02
Read the trend, not the number
A large number on its own says nothing. The small figure beside it, the one saying how much it gained or lost, is what tells you where the site is heading.
03
Ask one question at the next review
How many top-three keywords did we gain this month, and how many did we lose? If the answer is not in the report, that number is not being measured at all.
If all three come back healthy, the problem is not here, and we will tell you so on the first call.
Things worth saying plainly
- Referring domains went down. From 2,500 to 2,000. The count of domains is not a goal in itself, and we publish the number that fell the same way we publish the one that rose.
- There is no traffic figure on the second board. The screenshot was taken on a different tab, and we will not write a number that is not visible in the image.
- This is a large site with history. A smaller or newer site will not move at the same speed or the same scale.
- The name is withheld by agreement with the client, not by our choice.
Who this case resembles
If you find yourself in the first column, this story is about you.
- SEO work is running on your site and traffic is falling rather than rising
- Your monthly reports carry numbers that rise while sales stay flat
- Your site is large and many pages are losing their positions
- Somebody is building links for you and you cannot tell whether it helps
- Your site is new and has no ranking history to compare against
- Your problem is that the site is not being indexed at all, which is technical work that comes first
- You want a result within a month, which does not happen in cases like this
Next step
Is your site falling and you do not know why?
Send us the domain and we will look at the last 90 days and tell you whether it is falling, flat, or growing, and what is moving it. If there is no problem, we will say so.
Your details come to us and nobody else. We do not sell them or add you to a mailing list.
