Do Lost Backlinks Still Help Your SEO? The “Link Echoes” Effect

Couple of weeks ago, Google's Search Console's links report was broken. This is from Search Engine Roundtable. Tons of SEOs are seeing zero links in the report, whereas others are seeing huge drops in the link counts in [music] the report. Especially important, Google Search Console was showing SEOs that they had way less backlinks than they actually had. This ultimately ended up being a bug. Google's John Mueller even said it was a bug and they fixed it. But in this time, people were freaking out. And very few people were talking about the concept of link echoes [music] or link ghosts. So, I'm making this episode because even though I've talked about this on the show before, a lot of people who are doing search engine optimization, they still don't know that this exists. And even though I have talked about it on the show before, there are some other explanations which I have not talked about. What are link echoes? Well, I'm going to read SEO Sherpa's explanation of this experiment from Moz explaining the link echo effect. But basically, if you've ever worried about a lost backlink, if you've ever stressed out about link reclamation, "Oh, I lost a link. I have to reclaim it." This series of experiments from Moz shows that we may still keep the value from backlinks even when they disappear. This is the write-up from seosherpa.com in this 21 SEO experiments article that I always share. The idea is Google will continue to track links and consider the value of those links, positive or negative, even after the links are removed. In this case, does a website that increased in rank after a link was added continue to rank after the link has been taken away? Well, let's see. This particular experiment was performed by the team at Moz and was amongst a series that set out to test the effect of rich anchor text links on search rankings. But, as so often holds true in science, the experiments brought about some entirely unexpected findings. There were two websites in this experiment, website A and website B. Before the test, this is how they ranked for the same, not very competitive keyword. Website A was in position 31, website B was in position 11. During the test, links were added to 22 pages on various websites pointing to both website A and website B. Both websites, which received 22 links each, subsequently shot up the rankings. Website A moved from position 31 to position 1, an increase of 30 positions. Website B moved from position 11 up to position 5, an increase of six positions. Both websites increased in ranking considerably when the links were added, but what happened when those same links were removed? And the answer, drum roll, we need a drum roll sound effect. Here it is. The answer is very little at all. Website A stayed in the number one position, website B dropped down slightly to position six, a small drop of only one position. This experiment validates the hypothesis. It does appear that some value from links, perhaps a lot, do remain even after the links are removed. Could this experiment have been an isolated case? Not according to Rand Fishkin. Rand said, "This effect of these link tests remaining in place long after the link had been removed happened in every single link test we ran, of which I counted eight, where I feel highly confident that there were no confounding variables. Feeling really good that we followed a process kind of just like this. The links pointed, the ranking rose, the links disappeared, the ranking stayed high." So, this happened in eight different tests. The same thing happened in eight different tests. And this write-up continues, "Here's what's so remarkable. These rankings were not short-lived. They remained for many months after the links were removed. Rand Fishkin shared this in a Whiteboard Friday video. These are these classic Moz videos that Rand used to do. Rand is a SEO I I I had him on the podcast a couple of weeks ago and I called him the SEO Godfather. But, when he shared this in this Whiteboard Friday video, these rankings persisted for over 4 and 1/2 months and they just kept persisting. Rand said, "Not in one single test when the links were removed did rankings drop back to their original position." Now, this is the lesson from this write-up. But, there are other possible explanations. So, this write-up says the two major lessons, this is what the author got. Number one, quality links are worth their weight in gold. Like a solid investment, backlinks will continue to give you a good return. The echo of a vote, once cast, as proven by this test, will provide benefit even when removed. So, the vote is a backlink in this case. The second lesson, the value of links do remain for some time. So, before you get tempted into acquiring illegitimate links, consider if you're ready to have that remain a footprint for months or even years ahead. In short, spend your time focusing on building natural, organic links. Links can either work for you or against you. So, ensure that it's the former. Now, the interesting part, well, that's all interesting because if you've ever freaked out about lost backlinks, this shows that the positive effects still remain. And I can tell you, even in 2026, this is real. I still see backlinks that I got that were so valuable and I lost them and the rankings do not change. But, there are two other possible explanations, which actually suggests that you don't retain negative value if you are building links in illegitimate ways. The second possible explanation is my favorite. The first is just that in these experiments, by moving the test pages up through backlinks, they accidentally did something else to these pages that kept them ranking. So, maybe other pages on the site somehow got links, but this seems unlikely to happen with all eight experiments. The second possible explanation is my favorite, which is the pages performed well with click through rate and usage signals, like pogo sticking, and so these pages just maintained their rank. The keywords were not competitive, as the tests said. The click-through rate on these pages in the serps was good enough, and the usage signals were good enough as well. And so, because these pages were just good enough, they didn't lose their rankings. That, I think, is the most likely explanation, and if that's the case, then people's theories about the value of backlinks remaining is bunk. But, you know, it is possible that Google has something in their algorithm around link echoes. It could be a possible explanation that Google says, "Yeah, once you get one kind of link, that value is going to persist." It's a possible explanation. I just think the most likely is CTR and usage signals. With that said, we know that a penalization from Google is hard to shake, and people have reported that recent penalizations are lasting longer than they used to. Or, sometimes Google will put you in this box, like what happened with Google's helpful content update, where sites just lost most of their organic traffic, and the webmasters weren't even told why. They weren't given any notification, they just lost their organic traffic. But, having the effects of link spam persist is different from what's going on with link echoes. Anyway, this is a cool test. Not a lot of people were talking about it when there was this bug with Google Search Console around lost links and things like this show how SEO really works. We're demystifying Google's algorithms, so it's easier for you to get results. Next time you lose a backlink, don't freak out. You might have gotten the positive effects already. Now, if you want to save years learning how to do search engine optimization that gets paying customers, that gets users, that gets warm leads calling you up on the phone saying, "I found you on Google." Or ChatGPT recommended you. "I need you right now." My SEO course shows how to find people who are looking for what your brand sells. They don't know that your brand exists or your brand isn't top of mind, but they know what they want and what they want is what your brand offers and they're going to search engines, they're going to AI. My course shows you how to find what they're typing, what they're searching, how to target these searches with conversion-based SEO landing pages, not blog posts, how to structure your website for these pages, how to build links. So, so, so much is in this course. It's 13 and 1/2 hours. There's written sections, visual templates, Google Sheets, Google Docs, examples in every niche in the weekly breakdowns. There is so much. If you haven't checked it out yet, you're going to love it. It's at compactkeywords.com. I hope you'll give it a look. That's all that I got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1,076 of The AdWords Show, 1,076 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. We got an exciting week coming up, by the way. Lots of guests are coming on and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.