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 over a week ago

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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