Followed Backlinks to Small Business Websites Vanish Five Times as Often as Nofollow Links

A landscaping company gets a mention and a link in a local lifestyle blog's spring guide. Its monthly SEO report shows the new link, and the owner moves on. Four months later the blog redesigns its website, the guide is removed, and the link is gone. Nobody tells the landscaper, and the report quietly shows one link fewer.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Google treats good backlinks as votes of confidence, and they remain one of the strongest signals for ranking. Link rot is the steady loss of those links as pages are deleted, rebuilt or edited. For a small business that worked hard to earn its links, every lost link is lost value.

Link rot is steady and fast. 9.8% of new backlinks to small business websites disappear within a year, and the ones that go last a median of four months. The links that matter most go first: 15.1% of followed backlinks, which pass ranking value, have disappeared, five times the 3% rate for nofollow links.

We picked 250 random websites from US small businesses listed on Google in 56 industries; 249 had backlink records. For each website we collected up to 1,000 backlinks on September 23, 2026, 78,552 in all, including links already marked as lost, with the date each link was first found and last seen. For the one-year figure we took the 13,991 links first found between September 2024 and September 2025, so each had at least a year to survive, and counted how many were lost within 365 days of being found.

A followed link, often called dofollow, is an ordinary link that passes ranking value to the website it points to. A nofollow link carries a tag that asks search engines not to pass that value, and is common in directories, comments and sponsored posts. A link counts as lost when the page no longer carries it or the page itself is gone.

The loss keeps going after the first year. Of the backlinks small business websites gained between September 2024 and September 2025, 13.8% were gone by September 2026. Across all 78,552 backlinks, live and lost, 12.3% are marked lost. The links that go tend to go fast: a lost link lasted a median of 128 days, about four months, between first and last sighting.

Recent links give the clearest view of how fast links vanish. 13.5% of backlinks first found in 2026 are already gone, within months of appearing, and 12.7% of those found in 2025. A link profile that looks stable in a report is shrinking underneath, and a business that stops earning new links will see its total fall even if it does nothing wrong.

15.1% of followed backlinks are marked lost, against 3% of nofollow backlinks. The links that pass ranking value, the ones businesses work hardest to earn, are the ones that disappear. Many nofollow links to small business websites come from business directories such as Yellow Pages, DexKnows and Superpages.

The type of linking website matters too. Links from blogs were lost 0.9% of the time and from organization websites, such as associations and nonprofits, 5.5%. Links from general CMS websites, those built on a content management system with no more specific type, were lost 14.1% of the time, and from websites of unknown type 14.6%. The most durable links come from websites whose owners keep old pages online.

Check your important backlinks a few times a year. Most SEO tools list lost links. When a link you worked for disappears, contact the website owner: often the page was moved or rebuilt, and the link can be restored with a short email.

Budget for replacement. If one new link in ten is gone within a year, a steady flow of new links is needed just to stand still. When building links, favor stable sources such as partners, associations, blogs and directories you control, and keep a list of every link you earn so you know what to check.

Our link building services track every link we earn for a client and chase the ones that disappear.

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