Since the 2026 core update settled I’ve been going through the domains that link to my main affiliate site (kitchen gadgets). A worrying chunk of them got smashed. Rough numbers from third party estimates:
– 62 linking domains I’d consider decent
– 29 of them lost more than half their organic traffic
– 8 of those basically went to zero
My own site dipped about 15% and hasn’t come back.
What I can’t figure out is whether links from sites Google just demoted are now worth less, worth nothing, or even working against me. It kind of makes sense that if Google decides a site is low quality, its outbound votes count for less. But I haven’t seen anyone actually show it.
Has anyone looked at this properly? Did you do anything about links from sites that tanked, or is that pointless? Also curious if anyone is now checking traffic trend of a site over 2 years rather than current traffic before getting a link from it.
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