Domain Authority? Why is it declining according to Moz?
-
So I know what good SEO is, I am performing very well for this client but for some reason Moz Pro is saying their domain authority is declining with each index? Anything I can look into specifically to stop this from happening?
-
Thanks everyone, every bit of info was very much appreciated!
-
I agree with everyone here (thanks, guys!), and I want to add that DA and PA are both most useful when benchmarking against competitors, not as an absolute value.
Take this scenario—a high-authority industry site links to a large number of other sites in the same industry, and they all benefit from its authority. But if for whatever reason that site goes down or loses authority, all sites it links to could be affected. That could conceivably bring down the DA of a major portion of the vertical.
None of those sites did anything wrong, and since they're each others' main SERP competitors, their rankings may not change at all. But they'll now all have lower DA.
Does that help at all?
-
I think you may also need to look into what Rand said here: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here
According to Rand, Moz is indexing a bit of different stuff lately. This means that DA & PA will change depending on the link comp of your site.
I would start there - and not worry much about it. PA & DA are guides but don't determine your rankings.
-
In addition to the good things said by others
check your backlink profile versus your competitors, probably they are getting more backlinks or more authoritative ones, or maybe your old backlinks are poor quality and dropping in value,
check your backlink profile for anchor diversity and cross check with your competitors
are you having traffic drops? Maybe not overall, but hidden in some traffic segments? are those drops linked to a dropping ranking for some keywords? If so why? Increasing competition? Due to some backlink related issues? See above.
is your content quality dropping compared to your competitors? are you serving pages with thin content and your competitors are offering better content? Less duplicate? More targeted?
i could go on, but this is at least where I would start my homework
-
You may want to rely on more then just one site's DA metric to make your actual assessment. Moz's number while helpful is just a very educated guess; which can not take into account all the factors. What is most important is conversion rates, sales, or keyword rankings depending on what your goal is.
It is not uncommon for our DA to go up or down a few points month to month. This usually has a correlation to how many linking domains and the like the crawl comes back with. Not ever site will get scanned every crawl, so this number doesn't play a huge role in how successful I view my efforts.
Hope that helps,
Don
-
Because domain authority is capped at 100, it has to be a comparison of how the assets of your website compare to the assets of every other website out there.
To increase your domain authority, you must increase the assets of your site faster in comparison to all of the other sites on the web. So, a person could be working to improve their website and actually make progress, but domain authority could drop because other websites are doing more.
Rankings operate the same way. If you improve your website, but your competitor improves his more, then you will not advance to a position above him, even though you might have done a ton of work.
This is a very simplified explanation.
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
-
When domain a buys domain b (whose links direct to c), does domain a has links redirecting to domain c ?
Hi, I really need to know what happens when a company or domain (a) acquires another company with domain (b) with its links pointing to yet another location (c). Does company a then have redirects to c?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yeshourun0 -
How do you raise domain authority?
Hey guys, hoping you can help me out here. I've been tasked with raising several sites' domain authority to a level of 30. Right now, many of them are hovering around 20. Three weeks into this project and our numbers have dropped 1-2 points on average but I don't think our efforts would reflect that this quickly. From what I've read online, a good strategy is guest posting on relevant sites and collecting links from sites with higher DAs. I've also read at least one Moz article about this potentially being ineffective. I've read some of the related posts but they seem mostly dated and the answers didn't seem to help me. Hoping someone with some experience with this can help me out, I appreciate it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DustinAB0 -
Moz Rank and how to do better?
Could anyone offer me some help regarding Moz Rank? Of all the metrics this seems to be one where we want to improve but just have not been able to. Does anyone have any advice or tips that we could look at implementing to get this thing to move at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | halloranc0 -
Backlinks question: High Domain Authority, Lower Page Authority
We have a possibility of contributing guest blogs (with followed backlinks) to a site with very high domain authority (and highly trafficked), but when we've looked at the blog entires they already have, most of them have a much lower page authority. How do relevant links from a page with a lower PA but on a domain with a really high DA end up impacting our overall backlink profile? Can an expert or two give me some advice on what this may mean for us if we choose to go for it? In your opinion, does having lots of relevant links from a site with a much higher domain authority than ourselves (to give you an idea, our domain authority is in the low 60's, this site has a domain authority of almost 90) worth the time/effort/resources unto itself? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrowOrganic0 -
Local TLD Domain and languages.
Hello all, I have a local tld domain in spanish for .es. Now i want to translate the site content to english and german. What do you advice? 1.1 www.domainname.es/en/ and www.domainname.es/de/ 1.2 en.domainname.es and de.domainname.es Or buy a new .com domain and set it like this: 2.1. www.domainname.com and www.domainname.com/de (english will be main language) 2.2. en.domainname.com and de.domainname.com Or the last option ( the one i think it's better) Local TLDs 3.1 www.domainame.es , www.domainname.co.uk , and domainname.de In this last case , the domain name is KW + Brand , should i also translate the KW? For example: www.heladosolimpia.es , www.icecreamolimpia.co.uk Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Barbio0 -
Will authorship for a reviewer, not an author work?
I'm working with a client that owns a medical site. All content is reviewed by someone from their medical board (doctors or nurses), but the content is written by a variety of authors. I'm wondering if we could create authorship profiles for the doctors and nurses. Would there be any problem with that? (even though they didn't write the content, they just reviewed it for medical accuracy). The name of the reviewer is included on every article. Any thoughts / feedback / similar experiences would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Help! My Domain Authority keeps dropping! What do I do?
Hey! I just noticed my Domain Authority keeps dropping? What's happening? What do I do to get it better. I'm scared and dont know the next move to make to get this site better. Help please! Thanks! http://www.moondoggieinc.com Kristy O
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristyO1 -
Domain advice needed, please
Could i get a little domain advice please. Launching a new website project and want to put it on a domain we already own (both domains are in the same niche as the larger project). The new project will be aimed at the UK market. The choice is: .co.uk we own with a good name, however it's Domain Authority rank is 7 and it's only about 8 months old. .com domain which is 6 years old, has a Domain Authority rank of 33 but is not as good a domain name. The Competitive Link Analysis tells me that the rivals for the keywords we would be targeting are between 24 and 42. Which domain would people go with? All things equal it would be a fair guess that the older, higher Domain Authority ranked .com will require less work to rank in the engines, however it's not as good brand wise. Thanks Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0