Domain Authority: 23, Page Authority: 33, Can My Site Still Rank?
-
Greetings:
Our New York City commercial real estate site is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com.
Key MOZ metric are as follows:
Domain Authority: 23
Page Authority: 33
28 Root Domains linking to the site
179 Total Links.In the last six months domain authority, page authority, domains linking to the site have declined. We have focused on removing duplicate content and low quality links which may have had a negative impact on the above metrics.
Our ranking has dropped greatly in the last two months. Could it be due to the above metrics? These numbers seem pretty bad. How can I reverse without engaging in any black hat behavior that could work against me in the future?
Ideas?
Thanks, Alan Rosinsky -
Hello Alan, Jane got a lot of good answers for you below. I do agree with her ... Google is going to discover links at different times as many different sites get crawled. Your website ranking can be improved at all times as Google discovers the new links you build or acquire. We see clients site rankings go up consistantly all year long ... Not just 1 or 2 times per year during an update.
Like Jane said, that's where penalties are being discovered and given out. Your website will benefit from new links anytime they are discovered.
Regarding building links ... Social media shares and likes are not to replace link building but in addition to that work. ( Bit.ly is fine ) If you have time and know what to do, you could certainly get those links yourself. My clients just don't have time and are unsure how or where to get links. If you hire a good company, they should be able to make a big impact on a site with a relatively low DA / PA within a few months for sure.The higher your scores the more work it tkaes to improve them. It's easier to go from a PA of 15 to 25 than to go from a PA of 35 to 45.
Of course high quality content is the first step, next step is to get that content out to readers and followers so they can share the content they like. I would share your content on your social media platforms you use and work on buiding subscribers and an email list.
You could send out market analysis of sales in your area by price range, average days on market till sold. Put something usefull together ... you could also ask questions to your clients, sort of verbal survey to find out what kind of info they would like to see. Then put an optin offer, sign up with your email here and get our FREE market report... Real estate mistakes to avoid ! Give out some valuable info, help them out and build a loyal following.
You should do some research on your top ranking competitors and see where their highest PA backlinks are coming from ... and go after these links first ... that should get you some faster results ... of course research those links and make sure they are quality before you add them to your website.
For Twitter how about you use a more specific term like #nycofficespace
All the best,
Joe
-
Hi Alan,
I replied to you about this on another thread, but I wanted to reiterate:
My SEO firm claims that Google looks at link profile only when there is a Penguin update and that these only occur once or twice a year.
This is not correct. Google only looks at removing or handing out Penguin penalties during a Penguin update (1, 2 or 3 times per year is the norm), but regular sites with regular link development can improve at all times. Link building might take a month or so to really show progress, but Google crawls and updates its indices almost constantly. It's simply not true that you will only see ranking improvements once or twice a year.
Similarly, you can lose rankings if you lose links that were counting, outside of a Penguin update.
Regarding DA and PA - yes, you can rank well with any combination of these. They are not indicators of how well you will rank, but a gauge of what your site's authority is relative to every other site Moz analyses, based upon backlinks. DA and PA are configured in a way that is meant to best represent how Moz believes Google values backlink profiles, but clearly Moz doesn't have access to Google's actual algorithm or measures of which links Google counts / discounts / values / doesn't value.
Also, "can I rank well" depends on what query you want to rank for. You will easily outrank a far higher authority website if your site is much more relevant to the query (although it's annoying to see high authority websites pop into SERPs for queries that they're not particularly relevant for, and it does happen from time to time).
If you have relatively low authority and you're trying to rank against similar websites with DA / PA scores in the 70s or so, your job is likely to be a lot harder. That said, it can still be done with focus on the specific niches you're interested in and work on improving the number and quality of links pointing to the site.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Hi Joe:
Thanks for your response!!
My site is kind of dead in the water at the moment. It is my primary lead generation tool so this is very bad. Do you think that getting social media likes shares and links on Twitter and Facebook will work faster that acquiring links? Also what do you mean by using "an absolute domain" for social media posts? At the moment I take the URLS and have them reduced by Bitly so they are not as long. Is that OK? Also, on Twitter I always use #OfficeSpace at the end of the Tweet, is that best practice?
Regarding building links, do you think this would occur naturally if I add high quality blog posts or do you think it best if I somehow solicit these links? Can I develop these links myself or am I better off hiring an online marketing firm to generate them?
On a global basis I am a bit puzzled regarding how links work and when the effect ranking. My SEO firm claims that Google looks at link profile only when there is a Penguin update and that these only occur once or twice a year. So I am puzzled that my ranking has dropped after links have been removed, because there has not been an update. By the same token I have been told even if I build links that will have no effect until the next Penguin update. Am I understanding this correctly?
Best, Alan
-
That makes more sense to me now.
I would say that because you had so many links removed overall, some of which were definately bad links ... the sheer volume of links reduced your DA because even though some were bad links ... most likely some of them still did pass on some link juice (DA) to your website. That being said ... i have seen websites with just a hundred high quality back links out rank websites with thousands of low quality links ... it really is a tough mathematical equation to figure out exactly.
Make sure you get social media likes, shares and tweets ... also make sure you use the full absolute link like this http://www.mysitenamehere.com when adding a link to your tweets ...
Also focus on getting some high quality backlinks from related domains / citations with a higher PA than your website. Remember Google ranks pages, not websites ... so you really want to look at the PA of the actual page your back ink will be on ... not the DA for the whole domain.
Overall you are much better off in the long run by cleaning up the site and the bad links. Now just a little rebuilding to strengthen your website scores.
Joe
-
Hi Joseph:
Thanks so much for your response!
Our DA and PA numbers were a lot better in the past. Domain Authority was around 35 last September.
Since November I took the following steps that were suppose to help according to my SEO provider:
-Ran Copyscape report on site and got rid of about 12 pages of partially duplicate content. Page count for our site is 650 pages.
-A former developer had a mirror site that was indexed by Google. We had that removed.
-We used a 3rd party listing source that had thousands of pointed thousands of alpha numeric URLs to our site. We removed these links.
-In April we requested that about 100 domains remove toxic links to our site. About 30 complied. We disavowed the rest. We followed Google's SEO best practices, so I am very puzzled by the drop in DA and PA.
Any ideas???
Thanks, Ala
-
Hello Alan,
Yes, your website can rank with those numbers ... it's going to come down to your competitiors numbers as well as on page factors and keyword usage in titles and descriptions ect. ect. Based on the keywords you are going after and the competition level for each.
Of course building high quality backlinks will help get those DA and PA numbers up as well. There is no quick easy way ... just hard consistant work.
Also social media likes and shares and overall engagement will help with your rankings as well. Get your site liked and shared and tweeted about on a regular basis. Google +, facebook, twitter seem to help my sites do better.
It's basically a little bit of everything done consistantly while tracking and testing.
What were your DA and PA numbers before you noticed the drop in rankings ?
Hope that helps a bit!
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
-
Redirecting Pages During Site Migration
Hi everyone, We are changing a website's domain name. The site architecture will stay the same, but we are renaming some pages. How do we treat redirects? I read this on Search Engine Land: The ideal way to set up your redirects is with a regex expression in the .htaccess file of your old site. The regex expression should simply swap out your domain name, or swap out HTTP for HTTPS if you are doing an SSL migration. For any pages where this isn’t possible, you will need to set up an individual redirect. Make sure this doesn’t create any conflicts with your regex and that it doesn’t produce any redirect chains. Does the above mean we are able to set up a domain redirect on the regex for pages that we are not renaming and then have individual 1:1 redirects for renamed pages in the same .htaccess file? So have both? This will not conflict with the regex rule?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez0 -
How come a page can rank in top 10 for medium difficult keyword, with poor link profile.
Hi Moz Community, The keyword that http://customsigncenter.com/ is ranking for is "custom sign", the keyword difficulty is 38 (according to Moz Keyword Explorer). Here are the link metrics for the page and domain: Page authority: 27 Domain authority: 18 Facebook shares: 50 Linking RDs to the page: 7 Linking RDs to the Root Domain: 8 From the SERP, a lot of its competitors have better link profile than this guy. How come the page http://customsigncenter.com/ can rank 6th for the keyword "custom sign". Are there any important "hidden factors" behind the scene? Thank you for any help and support. Best, Raymond
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raymondlii1 -
Web Site Ranking
Hi Folks, I made some changes on my website www.gemslearninginstitute.com and published it two days ago. It was ranking on Google first page for a few keywords. I did not touch the pages which were ranking on first page. Since then I am not seeing the website ranking on the Google. Does it take a few days to rank again? How can I ensure that next time if I update the website or publish some blog on my website then it should not effect the ranking. Secondly, if I would like to rank in three different cities then do I need to create separate pages for each city or how should I proceed with this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fslpso0 -
Checking Rankings Again & Again Can Drop Rankings
Is it possible that if i check my google rankings again & again it can drop ranking?Like checking where do my keywords rank every hours rank drop the rankings? Because this indirectly affects the CTR. Might be because of it? No one has faced such an weird thing before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Wrong page getting ranked
Hi all, we have product category pages on our ecommerce web site and we also produce blog content (such as buyers guides, setup guides etc) to help with ranking and give our site some good quality, unique content. However we are sometimes finding that the buyers guide / blog content gets ranked by Google over our product category page. I'm hoping, if I give an example or two, some one smart out there may be able to point me in the right direction as to how we can avoid this and get the product category page ranked instead? You will see from my examples we are linking internally using the keywords from the buyers guides to the product category pages in order to show the most important page to Google for these keywords and are trying to structure the product category pages as well as possible to make it the most optimized page for the term. Example: Keyword "twin dvd player"... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/ ... blog page actually getting ranked for this keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/dual-screen-and-twin-dvd-player-explained/ Keyword "site radio".... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/audio/radio/site-radio/ .... blog buyer guide page actually getting ranked for keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/Site-radio-buying-guide/ Any help / pointers appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasef0 -
Page Rank
Hi guys I have an ecommerce in prestashop (unfortunatelly I can not change it at this moment). I made all main activities both off and on the page. And actually it is working pretty well since I am up on the SERP for all the target keywords. BUT, the page rank still be 0. The site is about 2 years old. My main competitor has the same domain authority than mine, but he has a page rank > 0 Moreover I have more quality links then it has, but it is older Any suggestions? Many thanks Ciao Diego
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrelax0 -
Ranking a site in the USA
I'm UK based and looking at setting up a site to rank in the USA. As I understand it a .com TLD is best but these are used worldwide so do I simply need to set the geotargeting to USA in webmaster tools? Or is there a better domain to use? With hosting the site in US and on page content related to US cities (I plan to create a page for each US city I operate in the the city name in the H1 tag) will that be enough for google to understand that the page should rank in the US version of google. Also how can I view Google USA search results - when I go to google.com it automatically redirects to google.co.uk and I can only change the location on the left hand side to UK cities. Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
I am SEO amameur and have bee adding links slowly to site. I cannot seem to increase my domain authority from 20 however, Anyone any advice please????
I updated meta tags on website 2/3 months ago and saw a significant improvements in rankings for keyowrds, however since then I have been dropping back down. I am wondering if this is because of low domain authoriyty. it is currentyly 20. www.babskibay.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | babski0