The natural loss of backlinks over time as partner pages change, get removed, or have links stripped.
Link decay is the gradual loss of backlinks pointing to your site over time. Studies tracking thousands of placements show that 20-30% of typical reciprocal links disappear within 90 days, and roughly half are gone within 12 months. Decay happens for many reasons: partners redesign their site, swap CMS, prune old content, switch to nofollow site-wide, or simply remove your link when the editorial team changes. Without monitoring, every removed link silently erodes your ranking signal until a manual audit catches it weeks or months later.
PositiveBacklink uses link decay signals as part of its automated link evaluation. Get 10 free credits →