Why Some Backlinks Stop Working After a Few Months

dark.woden · Friday at 11:47 AM

What I've been observing is that sometimes backlinks are very good when you create them, but then they become useless after a few months.Would like to know what you guys think about this. Do you check your older links to see if they have been indexed and if they are sending traffic or not

SmTasker · Friday at 11:48 AM

No, why waste time with that, just build more

INCC · Friday at 11:49 AM

The host site could have taken an update hit.

Or Google devalued the outgoing links due to link-farm recognition.

Also, link velocity is a thing. Can't sit on the same hands for too long.

jimmigelx · Friday at 11:58 AM

dark.woden said:
What I've been observing is that sometimes backlinks are very good when you create them, but then they become useless after a few months.Would like to know what you guys think about this. Do you check your older links to see if they have been indexed and if they are sending traffic or not

Yeah, I do that every few months to index and generate traffic.TBF, some links tend to become less valuable once they get dropped out.

sharifawan · Friday at 5:21 PM

First thing I do is just open the page the link sits on. Half the time it's been deleted, moved to a new url without a redirect, or the whole site stopped publishing, so the link isn't really devalued, there's just nothing left pointing at you.

DecodeTheSERPs · Friday at 6:00 PM

One thing that gets missed in this: a post on someone else's site is usually linked from their homepage and category pages when it's fresh, then it slides off and ends up buried with nothing internal pointing at it. The link to you hasn't changed at all, but the page carrying it is now crawled far less often and holds far less of that site's own weight. That decay curve lines up pretty well with the few-months pattern people describe.

Worth looking at the host page rather than your own metrics when one goes quiet. Is it still reachable in a couple of clicks from their homepage, or has it fallen into an archive nobody links to?

SerpStory · Friday at 6:14 PM

A backlink can lose value if the linking page is removed, deindexed, updated, or the link itself is changed to nofollow. I usually check whether the page is still live and indexed before assuming the backlink has simply stopped working.

Hetneo · Friday at 9:37 PM

sharifawan said:
First thing I do is just open the page the link sits on.

Same here, and I'd add two cheap checks on top of that, sharifawan: pull up that exact URL in a site: search to see if it's still indexed, and look at whether the anchor got quietly edited at some point. I've had placements where the page was fine and the anchor had been swapped to the site owner's own product.

Where I think people get stuck is the case where everything checks out. Page live, indexed, link followed, and it still does nothing. Google doesn't send you a note when it decides to count a link at zero, so an audit that hunts for 404s and nofollows comes back clean while the link sits there doing nothing.

So I stopped auditing the link and started watching the target page instead. Did rankings or traffic actually move in the three months after it went live? If they never did, then it didn't "stop working" in month four, it never worked, and you just noticed late. Not a fun answer but it saves a lot of time chasing ghosts.

awsking · Friday at 11:10 PM

It depends entirely on the banking system

RyanCrawls · Friday at 11:50 PM

Yeah links can definitely lose value over time. I check if the page is still indexed and the link is actually live before counting it as a useful backlink.

dylanbond2344 · Sunday at 1:58 AM

some backlinks can lose value over time when the page gets removed loses traffic or drops so checking your link profile every now and then helps you spot links that are no longer doing much

seotrends · Sunday at 10:20 AM

A few things I see a lot: the post gets deindxed or buried deep in pagnation as the blog publihes more, the host site gets hit by an update, or the link quietly gets remved or switched to nofollow. There's also the "sells to everyone" footprint. If a site sells posts to anyone who asks, its outbound links probably get discunted over time.

I recheck placements at around 30, 90 and 180 days for index status and whether the link is still live. Sites with real organic traffic hold up much better than ones with inflated DR.

moazzamhs12 · Sunday at 10:41 AM

Yeah, this happens quite often. Pages get removed, links become nofollow, or the page loses indexation. I usually check older backlinks periodically for index status, live links, and referral traffic.

GeeLark AI · Sunday at 10:43 AM

That can happen if the linking page gets deindexed, loses authority, changes, or the link is removed.

Try to check important backlinks occasionally, but I wouldn’t worry about every single link as long as the overall link profile stays healthy.

Mr.Dollar · Sunday at 12:28 PM

Usually the link itself did not die, the page holding it did. Owner reshuffles the blog, your post ends up buried with nothing linking to it internally and google quietly drops it from the index.

I do check the older ones every few months, index status mainly. Traffic i dont really bother with, most link pages never send any anyway.

AliesLiu · 2026-09-28T07:43:03+0100

dark.woden said:
What I've been observing is that sometimes backlinks are very good when you create them, but then they become useless after a few months.Would like to know what you guys think about this. Do you check your older links to see if they have been indexed and if they are sending traffic or not

sure, I do check the backlink that are there from my past work once in a while to find out whether the link is functional or not. this is done becuz sometimes links can get broken, expire, go useles or may not have any value anymore.

TurboCactus · 2026-09-28T07:51:58+0100

Check your old link pages every few months to make sure google is still indexing them.

jimmigelx · 2026-09-28T08:10:07+0100

dylanbond2344 said:
some backlinks can lose value over time when the page gets removed loses traffic or drops so checking your link profile every now and then helps you spot links that are no longer doing much

Sure enough, link rot happens. It is actually worthwhile to do a crawler audit of your website quarterly to identify broken links.

Sarah Mathews · 2026-09-28T08:15:14+0100

dark.woden said:
What I've been observing is that sometimes backlinks are very good when you create them, but then they become useless after a few months.Would like to know what you guys think about this. Do you check your older links to see if they have been indexed and if they are sending traffic or not

If there are issues with the referring page, such as the page being removed, deindexed, or the link being changed or removed, the backlink can lose its value.

Thats why I think its important to monitor backlinks consistently and address any issues when they occur. regularly checking older links can help maintain the overall quality of the backlink profile.

Rank Master · 2026-09-28T08:19:01+0100

Yeah, that’s true. I usually check the important backlinks once in a while to make sure the page is still live and indexed. No need to check every single link though.

Why Some Backlinks Stop Working After a Few Months

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