Domain authority decreased but rankings increased

[Ben-Cleaver]

Hello!

I'm a bit confused.  It seems the industry as a whole that my company operates in has taken a bash from the update a few days ago as all of the competitiors have taken a hit to their domain authority.  What is confusing is that my websites rankings have increased as well.

There has been a change to the robots.txt file in an effort to stop being crawled by SEMRush which is messing with my site stats but that is the only change.

Thanks in advance,

Ben

[Essential-Pest]

This has effected us just the same. We have not discovered anything in regards to SEMRush with our site, but our linking C blocks dropped. We're having a hard time understanding what happened with this as well. Even through the updates, our ranking on Google has stayed the same.

Searching for more information about this. Anyone that can help, we'd greatly appreciate it.

[Ben-Cleaver]

Hi Andy,

All have dropped roughly the same amount in terms of Domain Authority.

We have been working on Links recently so hopefully this will part of the reason for a pick up in rankings.

Someone keeps using SEMRush to spider the site which is then translating into huge amounts of referals data which in turn messes with bounce rate and stats of the site.  I'm trying to find the best way of blocking SEMRush off completely.

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

You mention your competitors DA has dropped but is your drop the same as theirs or less. You could have dropped but if your drop is less severe than your competitors, you will have benefited.

DA is a Moz score and not a Google score. It could be that your competitors could have been hit by one of the recent updates, so that's why you have increased. It could be your content is better than your competitors. However my ranking change daily so I have stopped monitoring my actual individual rankings and just revenue from Organic.

Have you recently got some good fresh links that are relevant that Google are taking into account to help your rankings.

I don't think stopping SEMRush will impact your results - out of interest what stats was affected as I am about to sign up.

[Ben-Cleaver]

Thanks Monica!

[MonicaOConnor]

Moz updated their API as well, so I think a lot of companies saw a change in DA over the past week. Check out the Mozscape info. The last two updates have affected rankings over the past few weeks. Keep an out for messages in GWT and your search impressions. Hang tight while things settle down in the algo world.