Link attrition, or link atrophy, is the strange phenomenon of losing link popularity or link value from the inbound links to a specific page of your website. In other words, your links are disappearing.

Why does that happen?

There are a number of reasons why your link atrophy is high. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• You have a lot of inbound links from the same domain disproportionate to other domains
• You have a lot of inbound links coming from press releases, which tend to be temporary links
• Website, or web pages, linking to you are being taken off line or the owners are not renewing their domain registrations
• You have made changes to your website and failed to provide the proper redirects

Those are just a few of the reasons your links could be disappearing, but I think those are the major reasons why. If you have an interest in testing your link atrophy, and I think you should periodically, here’s a cool tool to do just that.