Big drop in Domain Authority

[roberthseo]

Hello there,

Our domain authority dropped yesterday from 37 to 33 yesterday

Our domain name is: http://www.wallpapered.com

We have been building a few quality/relevant links in the last month so am very surprised by this big drop?

Would appreciate everyone's feedback?

Thanks

[randfish]

Hi Naracci - it's possible that the Mozscape index (which certainly doesn't have perfect coverage, but rather a more representative crawl coverage) hasn't seen all the links to your site. As you get them from more notable domains and pages, though, we should pick them up and you'll see that reflected in your DA/PA scores.

[naracci]

My Site is new only been live around 2 months. When i bought the domain it all ready had one backlink and my domain authority from just that one was 21, however yesterday that link seemed to have been removed and by domain authority has dropped to 1. It does not make any sense that one domain can impact so much. Despite this I have been working hard to add many more links but none of these have appeared and some are from major authority websites.  My domain is https://www.stampit.co.uk/

Can you kindly shed some light on this. Many Thanks

[dynamyt100]

I need some help here too please guys. I got the dreaded manual penalty last month (Unnatural links to your site—impacts links. Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more.)due to a mysterious donator of spammy links. I suspect a competitor has done this. Admittedly when I started the site years ago I was using bad techniques but have since converted to all white hat best practices. Ive been working desperately to disavow and am about to embark on a very costly content exercise to gain some real quality links. However, since Google gave me the message my life is in a downward spiral as my site literally feeds me and my children. My DA has gone from 49 to 15 (I lost about 150 links to the disavow), my ranks are dropping daily. Is this huge drop in DA due to the disavowed links?

What can i do to save my site?

Unnatural links to your site—impacts links

Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole.Learn more.

[Krishey]

Agree. Thank you!

[randfish]

Hi Brian - that's not quite accurate. It isn't that DA scores are all going to go up - in fact, many of the ones that were higher in our last couple indices probably should have been lower, and this is more a correction/normalization. As I noted in another response here, following a single DA score can be very unrepresentative of reality vs. following many scores in a niche across competitors. DA fluctuates as Google updates their ranking algorithm because DA uses machine learning against Google's SERPs (and ~once a year) we retrain our model.

Domain Authority scores aren't great ways to know how you're performing in SEO in absence of context, but they can be very good to see how you're performing against other sites in your industry or with whom you're competing in search results.

Every new index we produce has lots of scores going up and down because the link profiles that correlate best with ranking higher in Google change, the links we discover change, the sites that get penalized or that grow rankings substantially change, etc. Domain Authority is less like a fixed metric that grows as you grow your link profile and more a relative metric that changes as the web and Google change.

Hope that helps!

[BrianJGomez]

Perhaps I'm the squeaky wheel here, and I understand that's not the culture on these forums (which I'm ALL for 99.9999% of the time) ... but to me, if the DA's are going to go back up, why drop them?  For us, DA is something we educate our clients on, we preach it's credibility/accuracy, and we ask our clients to hold us accountable to it. But now, I'm going to have to essentially undermine its credibility to explain to my clients that this is a large scale drop and it should go back up again soon.

I'm done being the squeaky wheel now. I am a big believer in DA and Moz in general ... these forums have the sharpest people in the industry. I just felt compelled to express some frustration.

[CandymanKen]

Thanks for a great explanation,I agree with Jordan that checking competitors trends was a great addition. We saw a small drop is DA and I was at first concerned,but then noticed we did fine relative to our competitors. Thanks Kyle

[randfish]

Yeah - that's likely a combination of the new index being smaller and of us cutting out stuff that we think Google may not have been counting. In future indices, you should see it go up again. My advice is always to watch your competition's numbers, too, as relative indices like Mozscape will reflect those changes best in relative numbers.

[roberthseo]

Hi Rand,

Thanks for the detailed reply. That's really helpful.

Our total number of links went down from 2080 in May to 576 in June.

See attached a screenshot from OSE showing the difference between the two indexes.

Robert

m6VYDbX.jpg

[PatrickDelehanty]

Great information, Rand. Thanks!

[randfish]

Hey gang - thought I'd jump in with some official word from the Mozscape/Big Data team:

This latest index is smaller than prior ones, meaning we indexed fewer webpages total. However, the quality and importance of those pages in general is higher. In particular we've cut out a exceedingly large number of pages and subdomains on many Chinese sites that appeared to be biasing our crawl priorities and giving us some serious processing trouble.

DA, PA, and link metrics have maintained very similar correlations with Google rankings in this index, so if you've seen a large drop in either, it may be related to the removal of links that Google may not have been counting very highly. However, it's also possible that you've lost DA/PA from links that Google did count and Moz should be, too. As we regrow our index size in the next 2-3 updates, you may see a return of those scores. We do expect the next few indices to process much more quickly than the lag we experienced in the last few, and are watching indices very closely to make sure we're on the right track.

Also, with DA/PA drops, note that every index these occur, primarily because the sites and pages at the very top of the metrics scale (with PA/DA scores in the 99-100 range) are growing their link profiles massively, thus stretching what it means to have those incredibly high scores. If you had a DA of 90, and gained great links at the same rate you did last year, but many other DA 90+ sites were growing their link profiles even more rapidly (which tends to be how the web goes - the rich get richer, faster, every month), your DA would likely fall a few points even though you technically are still growing your link profile. DA/PA of 100 gets harder and harder to achieve every index because of the rate of growth of pages like Twitter.com, Google.com, and Facebook.com.

[DavidLee]

I also wanted to chime in and mention that it takes about 2-3 index updates for us to process discovered links. Newly created links a month prior to a release generally won't appear in next immediate release. The best way to know when to expect your links to be included in the index is to look in the Just Discovered Links tab and pay close attention to the discovery date. Links discovered in March/April, could potentially show up in a June/July update. Sites with high domain authority always have links that are always being picked up so their fresh links "stack" and their DA remains stable with slight increases or decreases.

Hope this helps!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Have you considered running a backlink audit to see if you have any backlinks that need to be removed, disavowed, or updated?

Go through your backlinks and ask the following questions:

• Does this link help my website?
• Is this link relevant to my website?
• Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it?
• Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website?
• If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy?

A lot of this relies on common sense, but just as you take in the good, you have to be ready to remove the bad. Your backlink profile requires regularly check ins, so be prepared to do this every so often (I try to do it 2 to 4 times a year).

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[KyleEaves]

The Mozscape Index update yesterday includes even fewer urls, root domains, subdomains and total links than the previous Index from May 5th. You can compare the size of the Indexes on the Mozscape API Updates page. Most likely, you've built additional quality/relevant links as you have mentioned, but with the smaller Index these new links, and even previously indexed links, are not being picked up. Therefore, less links are being used to calculate your domain authority score. I would say the drop in your Domain Authority is due to the size of the index. Try checking out your competitor's sites to see if their domain authority dropped as well. I know mine went down slightly yesterday. You don't have anything to worry about, just keep earning quality links. I know it is tough to see your domain authority drop when you work hard to earn/build links, but the data used from one Index to the next has not been consistent, so don't worry too much about the increase/drop in domain authority from one index release to the next. If anything, track your domain authority over time and compare it to the size of the index to get a better idea of how your link building is performing. Unfortunately, that is the best answer I can give at this time.

[Keszi]

Hi,

Yesterday there was a Mozscape Index update. (https://moz.com/products/api/updates)

More than possible you can see the effect of that update. It is enough if your current linking domains have their DA drop, and it can effect your DA value. But as John mentioned above, if the rankings have not been effected, I would not worry about it.

Keep up the good job!

Keszi

[ClaytonJ]

Robert,

Unless it is on your dashboard for the boss as a measurement tool, then I would not be concerned.

Sounds like you are doing great work. I cannot provide an explanation - except to say the DA is a useful tool in the tool box but the ultimate measurement that matters is rankings - and you seem to have that covered. If anything happens negatively on rankings I would dig deeper but at this stage I would recommend monitoring... but not much more.

[roberthseo]

Hi John,

There has been a big fluctuation both up and down for most of our keywords in the last month.

However, I would say our overall ranking has improved over that period.

Thanks

Robert

[ClaytonJ]

Before we go further - have you noticed any dip in page rankings, have you lost any positions? For sought after keywords.