Domain Authority and Links drastically decreased in less than a month
-
I'm fairly new to SEO, and am left completely perplexed about why our two SEO client's links and DA decreased so drastically in so little time.
Looking at their stats on Moz, between May and June, their DA's went down by 3-5 (which, they were fairly low to begin with), and external links were halved! This is rather concerning to me as building their external links has been my focus for the past few months for both of them.
There are a number of tweaks that I could make to site structure in terms of meta descriptions and page title length (though I can't fix that as the clients want to keep the titles as is), however there are no critical errors. I have also placed a lot of filters on both of their Google Analytics pages as they were getting what I just now realized was a ton of spam, though I don't see how that would affect anything.
I just can't imagine what lead to all of those external link suddenly dropping. I imagine the drastic drop in those lead to the DA decrease, but again, I'm very new, so I'm not certain.
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. I have been panicking quite a bit since I've seen this!
-
Sure thing, those posts from May were probably after the last release of the index (May 5th). Hopefully you will see your site's DA return to a similar level, or even higher with the next release of the Index (scheduled June 23rd). Here are a few additional threads with more explanation. Nothing to worry about, you're not alone.
http://moz.com/community/q/what-s-the-story-on-mozscape-updates
http://moz.com/community/q/what-causes-total-external-links-to-fluctuate-so-much
http://moz.com/community/q/significant-drop-in-external-followed-links -
Ah, I had read about that change in a similar post from May, and thought it had been resolved. Thank you for the quick response. Will try to turn off the panic now!
-
Other users have experienced similar things with the most recent MozScape index since it was smaller than previous ones. There should be a new update coming in about two weeks, that will be a good opportunity to measure results and compare with previous Indexes. Since your client's sites don't have many links to begin with, even small variations in the index could cause major shifts in the site's DA. Check out this thread below for an explanation, it sounds like you're experiencing a similar situation.
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
-
UTM Links Showing Up as Separate Pages in Google Analytics
Hey everyone, I was just looking at landing pages in Google Analytics, and in addition to just the URL of the landing page, the UTM links are being listed as separate pages. Is this normal? I anticipated seeing the landing page URL and then using the secondary dimension to see source/medium. If this isn't normal, what would I check next?
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
I am tracking my domain e.g www.xyz.com to an existing google analytics account . I want to track www.xyz.com/blog separately in the google analytics account. How can I do that?
I am tracking my domain e.g www.xyz.com to an existing google analytics account . I want to track www.xyz.com/blog separately in the google analytics account. How can I do that?
Reporting & Analytics | | Windlass0 -
Google as referring domain
Hi all, a colleague asked a question, which I could not answer (never even noticed this "problem") 😞 When we are logged into our GA account and go the referring domains section, we find Google. I always thought that these visitors came via Google Image Search, but not all of them do. Most of them come via "/imgres", but some come via "/" (always thought that "/" was the homepage?), "/url" and "//" Maybe I am just stupid, but honestly I could not explain what these strings mean... or how these visitors landed on our site... Can you help me???
Reporting & Analytics | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Help! Organic traffic decreased 75%.
Hi all, I've had fairly steady organic traffic to my website (www.toptienmobiel.nl) for the last 2 years. Since the beginning of march however I've noticed that the organic traffic was decreasing. Up until now my total organic traffic has decreased to about a quarter of what it was. It doesn't seem to be a penalty, since I still have most of my important keywords on the first page. They've decreased significantly though, mostly from the top 3 to 7+ position. Any idea on what may have been the reason for this sudden decrease? My link profile is still natural and I haven't done anything radical to the website concerning the backlinks or on-page elements. Could it be an algorithmic (Panda / Penguin) update? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | samerhadionline0 -
Subdomain and relative link paths cause crawl errors
I have a Wordpress blog on our subdomain and we use relative paths on our domain. It appears as though Google bot is crawling from the subdomain categories back to the domain relative paths. This of course results in hundreds of 404 pages. Any suggestions as to how to resolve this issue without changing the relative path structure of our domain? I can provide more information if need be. While I realize these issues are not that pressing, I'd obviously like to remove as many errors as possible. If anyone has encountered this problem, especially in Wordpress I'd really like to hear your solution or lack there of. Thank you in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | BethA0 -
Tagging URLs Linkbuilding and anchor links
Hi, I am going to publish a press release on a number of different websites. First and foremost, I want to build anchor links back to website for specific keywords. Secondly I want to measure clickthrus from each site using parameter tracking in GA. I want to know if I put in a url with ?utm_source=xxx, will this have any impact upon my linkbuilding efforts? i.e. will search engines attribute the keyword to the long url with tracking or the url without tracking. I understand that everything from the ? mark is ignored. However, i just want to double check before I publish release. Thanks for your help. Mik
Reporting & Analytics | | increation0 -
Custom GA tracking and link value
Hi I'm working on a real estate agents web site which has a lots of links coming from paid listings in real estate linstings sites (this in France so I'm not sure examples will mean anything but basically the agents have 900 house listings in each site and each listing has a backlink) In analytics these are classified as referals and that's fine for the moment But because sites provide different types of links, we are considering tagging all paid links with analytics utm codes. Mainly to learn which ads are actually providing qualified traffic (providing contacts). I'm guessing that currently these links, there are thousands, bring seo value to my client's web site and are not considered as paid links. Will adding the analytics codes to these links cause a loss of their value by clearly indicating to Google that we paid for them? What's the current thinking on this? I'm tempted not to be worried about being honest about the origin of these links but I'm worried that there is a real danger of loosing current ranking Any arguments FOR tagging paid links ? Thanks for you help Neil
Reporting & Analytics | | NeilInFrance0 -
Google Analtyics Cross Domain Tracking - in a form
I have a 3rd party booking engine that is causing my own domain to show up as a top referreral in google analytics. The vendor is on my very last nerve 🙂 So they're not helping. Would anyone be interested in helping a newbie out with a frustrating problem? Code: Reservations Page - function SubmitReservationForm() {. . . .
Reporting & Analytics | | jenny05
ResLink = "http://www.bookingengine.com/res/vn4/checka.aspx?month=" + Month + "&day=" + Day + "&year=" + Year + "&nights=" + Nights + "&rooms=" + Rooms + "&adults=" + Adults + "&children=" + Children + "&B1=Check+Availability&hotelid=xxxx"
pageTracker._link(ResLink);
return true;
} On Every page: Any thoughts would be appreciated! I believe the problem is pageTracker._link(ResLink); but I'm clueless on fixing it.1