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
-
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2\. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect?
I'm going through the crawl report and it says I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2/ Now, the author/admin/page/2 I can't even find in WordPress, but it is the same thing as blog/page/2 nonetheless. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect it to blog/page/2?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shift-inc0 -
Can't understand our Ranking; DA, PA and On Page all better than Competiton; Ranking no where
Our rankings are up and down but our domain is clean, DA and PA good
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexSTUDIO18
and there is really in depth content which is all original. We are at a bit of a loss; The site is
http://www.fightstorepro.com I can use the phrase "Boxing Gloves" as an example
http://www.fightstorepro.com/gear/gloves/boxing-gloves.html PA 26 , DA29
Good original content; Video content, On page grade A
Not ranking in top 50 places?? The competitor in Pos4 is not matching our placing Anyone shed any light on this?0 -
Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
Hello Community, What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0 -
Root domain authority or page authority - which matters more
When does one matter more than the other? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Matthew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mrupp440 -
Why is Google Still Penalizing My Site?
We got hit pretty hard by Penguin. There were some bad link issues which we've cleared up and we also had a pretty unique situation stemming from about a year ago when we changed the name of the company and created a whole new site with similar content under a different URL. We used the same phone number and address, and left the old site up as it was still performing well. Google didn't care for that so we eventually used 301 redirects to push the link juice from the old site to the new site. That's the background, here's the problem...... We've partially recovered, but there are several keywords that haven't come back anywhere near where they were in Google. We have higher page rank and more links than our competition and are performing in the top 5 for some of our keywords. Other, similar keywords, where we used to be in the top 5, we are now down on page 4 or 5. Our website is www.hudsoncabinetrydesign.com. We build custom cabinetry and furniture in Westchester County, NY just north of NYC. Examples - For "custom built-ins new york" we are number 3 on Google, number 1 on Bing/Yahoo. For "custom kitchen cabinetry ny" we are number 3 on Bing/Yahoo, not in the top 50 on Google. For "custom radiator covers ny" we used to be #1 on Google, are currently #48, currently #2 on Bing/Yahoo. Obviously, we've done something to upset the Google, but we've run out of ideas as to what it could be. Any ideas as to what is going on? Thanks so much for your feedback, Doug B.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | doug_b0 -
My site rank is not consistent. Once it at first page , then for the next week it is not found in top 100 position. Again two/ three weeks later it ranked automatically without any work. Why this is happening?
Here's the following are available in my site: robot.txt file is included sitemap available Natural link building going on. in a week total 100 links we are creating. 30 social bookmarks, 30 directory submission, 20 blog comments, 20 forum links All the blog and forum links are from relevant sources. Please help me ..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coldfireinc0 -
Google swapped our website's long standing ranking home page for a less authoritative product page?
Our website has ranked for two variations of a keyword, one singular & the other plural in Google at #1 & #2 (for over a year). Keep in mind both links in serps were pointed to our home page. This year we targeted both variations of the keyword in PPC to a products landing page(still relevant to the keywords) within our website. After about 6 weeks, Google swapped out the long standing ranked home page links (p.a. 55) rank #1,2 with the ppc directed product page links (p.a. 01) and dropped us to #2 & #8 respectively in search results for the singular and plural version of the keyword. Would you consider this swapping of pages temporary, if the volume of traffic slowed on our product page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JingShack0