Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why is my domain authority so low?
-
Hello, a couple of years ago I started publishing on my site more than 10 posts a day of content that no one else had. For this reason, my competitors started paraphrasing my content without giving proper attribution, and they ranked better in Google.
That's why I realized that apart from creating content I had to work on my SEO, so I started to get some backlinks, most of them via contests on blogs. I am getting about 1 high quality link from PR2, PR3 or PR4 blogs each week. According to Open Site Explorer, I have 20 root domain links (200 total links). In reality I have more backlinks but they don't show up (they do show up in Ahrefs, about 50 root domains). To my surprise, I only have 15 Domain Authority.
This is the most evident example, take a look at this screenshot: http://imgur.com/dFk2rkx
My website is on the far left, two of my competitors on the right. As you can see I win every category except total links and the most important, domain authority. Are total links that important for Domain authority, even if 99% are internal? By the way, I also have more posts than these guys, I don't know why the report says otherwise. Why is the site on the right ranking so high?
The same thing happens with the rest of my competitors, they have a lot of low quality links from "lists of domain sites" and in general a lot of very spammy links.
According to what I have been reading, my good quality links should be more helpful than my competitors' spammy links, which should in fact affect them. So what is going on? I have no idea if I'm doing things right. Why is my domain authority so low? Thanks for your help.
-
Feel free to inmail me your url and I'll look at it more closely.
Best... Mike
-
Thanks again for your reply, I'll try your suggestion, I suspect internal linking might be the culprit. My site is fast, less than 2 seconds in pingdom tools, I am even using a CDN. Bounce rate has been a solid 42% the whole year.
But still, my question still stands, how come my domain authority appears so low in OSE compared to those other sites? To be honest it doesn't make any sense when you see the numbers...
-
If those comparisons are your main competitors and if they consistently/clearly outrank you, then I don't think the problem is in the numbers OSE shows. It could be alot of other things, including but not limted to internal linking, or CTR in SERPs (title tags) or user signals like bounce rate, or duplicate content or depth of content or site speed or downtime or a combination of those things and others.
On what you show in those comparisons and what you say about the quality of the back links etc, I would choose your link profile over theirs.
Consider making a spreadsheet of pages/terms where you are clearly beaten by these sites. Then, list across the top all of the different ranking factors you can think of. Then, fill in the info for your pages and your competitors and look for patterns. That's what I would do.
I hope that helps a little. Best... Mike
-
Hello, thank you for your answer.
I signed up for a Moz pro account less than a week ago, so I don't really know how long it's been like this.
My home page authority is marginally better compared tho these two sites, here is a screenshot: http://imgur.com/jd6pwzj
I am not ranking better than my main competitors on Google, I have searched for articles and most of my competitors usually rank better. Since I update my site a lot I am still getting around 5K uniques a day, but I know it could be much better.
Any suggestions? Thank you so much for your help.
-
That is frustrating. At the same time, it sounds like you're doing alot of right things.
Here are a few questions for you:
How long has it been at D/A 15?
What's your home page authority and how does that compare to these competitors?
How are the actual search results going in terms of, for instance, traffic to your site?
Just a note that Moz's tools, as good as they are, are not synonymous with how Google sees it.
Best... Mike
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Exact Domain Match does it help or distract?
Does owning / buying an exact domain match help or not necessary? For example our main website ranks for nearly 14,800 Keywords but one KW we are trying to get in the top spot for we are currently at the bottom of page #1. We do see an exact domain match available so we purchased it but i don't know if it would actually help us or distract us. I was thinking we could create an article about the keyword on that exact domain then do some on page seo and back linking. But would that be more of a distraction VS. just focusing on getting more high quality back links to the main website we have ranked on Page 1 at the bottom? Any ideas or benefits to use an exact domain match to help boost also?
Link Building | | Cfarcher0 -
Why My Domain Authority Dropped
Hello sir i noticed that my DA is Dropped From 27 to 26 Of this website https://www.mytechtalk.org/. What is the reason I don't i try a lot to find a solution but not get . But I notice that in google webmaster tool the domain linking increased every time but on the Moz.com, not domain added even my DA Dropped. Even When i checked my site on https://ahrefs.com/ he shows approx 350 domain with high da and pa. help me i am getting frustrated. Is that Moz is crawling All domain Fairly or not ??
Link Building | | rishu57819 -
Moving blogs to different domain
Hey guys, We currently have some blogs on one of our pages (fraserisland.com.au) and we are launching a complete rebranding of our sites. We want to move the blogs from fraserisland.com.au to the new parent page of travelfreedom.com.au (but still link it to fraserisland.com.au), however I don't know what affect this will have on the ranking of the blogs. The biggest thing I'm worried about is that the domain will be completely different, and not a sub domain, but I'm not sure what impact this will have on the effectiveness of SEO on the blog. Thanks guys
Link Building | | Mysites0 -
How do we optimise links from a parent company to a subsidiary on different domains
So we are the agent for an industrial company. They don't have a great website (well its pretty but doesn't rank) and have 5 product pages with a variety of products on each. We've taken those products and turned them into 50 pages with good on page optimisation. Now they've just agreed to give us a link on each page and I'm trying to figure out what the best text and link will be. As far as I can see there are three options Visit our agent for X region - sending to the home page If you are from X region you can request a sample of product group from our agent - sending to home page and product category page on our site If you are looking for X, Y, Z or P, Q, R in this region contact our agent there. - sending to home page and individual product pages The aim of this is to boost my page authority as 98% of the top 10 in SERPS have pages with zero authority and rely on the on page optimization and DA. Is this the best approach or are there other better ways of approaching the problem. It's worth noting that there is a total separation of control and ownership of the websites. I'm also starting to work with them to improve their on page optimisation and get links from their parent company to increase link juice
Link Building | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
What benefit does a site with a low DA get from someone guest posting who links to a site with a high DA?
I'm relatively new to link building and although this may be an obvious question I can't seem to find an answer anywhere even after searching Google.
Link Building | | JoshED0 -
Building backlinks on sub-pages instead of main page(rood-domain)
Hey Mozzers! I am facing a problem and I need advice. I have recently opened my new website, which purpose is to offer quality articles, optimized for SEO. The problem is that I cannot find the right keyword to use for the main(root) domain (http://xxxxxx.org) as it is consisting of many niches. Is it a good idea to build backlinks on pages (http://xxxxxx.org/the-keyword-for-ranking) instead of building them on my root-domain? So basically, my root-domain will have less backlinks than my pages inside? Please give me some advice and way to act with. Thank you
Link Building | | Ralchev0 -
Hubpages and Page authority
Hi, I've created a Hubpage awhile back and I see the url has a page authority over 50. How much does Domain authority influence page authority? The url has only 3 (registered) backlinks, so I cannot see an obvious explanation why. I understand that Hubpages was one of the sites that "took a hit" with the Panda update, but it has a domain authority of 84...
Link Building | | vibelingo0 -
Does linking to a subdomain give link juice to the main domain?
I have a few domains that I'm going to use for link building, will the link juice from the sub domains transfer to the main domain?
Link Building | | Vsky0