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
-
Why did my Domain Authority drop?
I had an ok domain authority. We focused on building backlinks for our website and it shows that we received a significant number of backlinks. However, today, our DA fell significantly. I don't understand why that happened. Can someone please help me with this situation? Thank you.
Link Building | | MizbaCMU1 -
My site is linked from over 900 "The Globe"-domains - disavow or not?
Hi! As some of you may be familiar with, there is a giant spam-network with the same design and same page title on all domains: "The Globe - The world's most visited web pages". For example: theglobe.at
Link Building | | Sindre
theglobe.co.za
www.internet-search.us I've now discovered that over 900 of these spam-domains link to my site. My plan was of course to disavow them all, but Google is explicit on telling me to be careful. «Only disavow if you are certain that the links are damaging to your rankings». And to be honest, I'm not sure. Also: it seems drastic to disavow almost a thousand pages. I'm afraid to mess something up. What would you do?3 -
Backlinks from ads on parked domains? Is this possible?
Hello Moz Friends, So as I was researching some competitive backlinks and I noticed a lot of backlinks that a clients competitor has are on parked domains and they appear to be google ads from some point. You know the pages that this page no longer exists, or hey do you want to buy this domain? and it has like 6 google ads on it? Yep those pages. My clients industry is construction and their competitor has links from zombie websites, foreign, websites and more. But the links are no longer on the page. Like when it was crawled, their ad was showing. Does this make any sense and is it usually temporary? Thank you for your thoughts friends!
Link Building | | asbchris0 -
Author Bio
Hi In my quest to develop a strategy to enhance "brand exposure" I'm considering guest blogging on sites with very good authority. However my question is; 1. Can I post my article and place my "author bio" (which includes my company linked name and social platforms) at the bottom of an article? 2. Should author bios links be no follow? 3. Or, does Google allow page rank to pass for this. We have some fantastic articles that are based on projects we've carried out, and would like to share these with readers on Dezeen, Contemporist and the rest of the interior design world. Your help is always very much appreciated! Regards Gary
Link Building | | GaryVictory0 -
Finding pages with a high Page Authority
Hi, Whats the quickest way to find pages with a high authority using SEOMoz? Cheers Mik
Link Building | | increation0 -
Are backlinks to a domain that redirects useless?
I am working on trying to get backlinks. We are currently redirecting a few Domains to our current domain name. One of the Domains that is redirecting is the main Domain, we will be advertising in the near future. Can I send backlinks to the redirected URL or does it only carry link juice if it is to the main Domain?
Link Building | | hfranz0 -
Do links from my own subdomain to my main domain carry any value?
I currently have a Wordpress blog set up on a subdomain i.e blog@ etc. I wanted to know whether the links from the blog to my main site carry any value.
Link Building | | Store210
