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What are "Dropped" links?

Ahrefs reports a backlink as dropped, but I can still see it on the page. Why?

Rebekah avatar
Written by Rebekah
Updated this week

Dropped are links from pages that were removed from our index due to various reasons. These include:

  • Page duplicates: We crawled a "better" page with the same content

  • Disallowed: The page was disallowed by robots.txt for at least 6 months

  • Unavailable: The page returned an error 3 times, and the last successful download was at least 1 month old

  • The domain does not exist anymore

  • The page has a low URL rating

As such, even though the link itself may still exist on the page, we indicate it as Lost: dropped when we no longer index the page itself.

In general, we can only update a certain amount of pages for every given domain/URL. 

Hence, we choose the most qualitative ones and drop the others from our index in order to keep it fresh and current.

 

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