Hi, I was wondering, from a SEO point of view (ranking in SERPs, PR evolution...), what do you think would happen if you suddenly loose a huge number of BL ? For instance if you remove a sig in a forum or loose a link in a blogroll. I guess it's depends of the ratio (number of removed BL / total number of BL) but what do you think would be the consequences of such a drop for differents values ? If some of you ever experienced that, would mind sharing your experience ? What was the ratio and the consequences. And if it's didn't happen to you, what's your guess about it ? Thanks, Monty
links in sigs don't do much. blogrolls can help, though they suffer some of the same problems (too many outgoing links on one page, for example). there are two consequences to losing backlinks: 1) you may lose your positioning for whatever anchor text you were using on said links 2) your internal PR will change and your site will be less important to google. how much of a change this will be will depend on how many other quality incoming links you have. if that's all you have, good luck. if it makes up a small percentage I wouldn't even worry about it.
Sorry, but I didn't get your point about "internal PR", what do you mean ? For the percentage, I don't know this is why I asked about different values (Actually it didn't happen to me, it's just a theorical question). Let's say a new site, with not yet a solid linking, with a drop of about 30-40% of it's incoming links from an authoritative blogroll. (others ongoing links being about of the same quality and well spread across differents sites)
My guess would be not much will happen if you can manage to get new links within a month or two. I have dropped Forum Signatures without any evident effect and I am going to get out of link-vault by gradually removing it from my sites (the links were not relevant anyways). I have had people drop links from link exchanges I made (large sites) and I didn't even find out until I programmed my link checker.
Interesting, but how much those links represent in percentage of the total incoming links ? Cause I'd rather think that from a certain percentage of the total, a drop of a significant amount of links would be noticed
Probably yes, but if you double your efforts to obtain new links at the same time it may not be such a big deal. If the links you are about to drop are not very relevant, I'd say it doesn't matter much. If they are the most relevant then you should do everything you can to keep them.