Domain Authority drop due to Moz update?
-
Hi guys,
I have noticed an unusual Domain Authority (DA) drop in mid November for many different websites here in Sweden. There was a Moz update the 12th of November which I assume has to do with this drop.
I have attached the DA history chart to visualize the drop.
Does someone have any information about:
- Did the drop in DA have to do with the update the 12<sup>th</sup>?
- Did the new update have a new type of metric calculation?
- Is anyone else experiencing this drop?
Any extra details would be helpful.
Thanks a lot guys.
-
Ultimately people complain about DA because they lack the understanding of what it measures.
DA paints a picture of the hierarchy of the web and your "ranking" within the web. This is how DA was designed. As professionals we have chosen to utilise this ranking but sadly people are using it without first learning fully what it means and as such fall into pitfalls
The scale is designed to represent the whole web. The web is to large to simply divide into smaller sections that allow you to have a scale in which you can climb. If you define a static ceiling or remove the ceiling you either end up with all websites above the ceiling forcing it to be redefined anyway or allow DA to climb so high that it is unobtainable anyway.
DA can tell you everything you need it to, as long as you stop looking at it as a figure only you can influence.
-
Good answer. I do think, though, that Moz might have to field less concerned individuals complaining about drops in DA if 100 represented a number of links no website will ever reach.
If the scale has to be normalised every time the index is crawled because the ceiling sites are snowballing links at a rate at which the rest can't keep up, perhaps it's time to look at the scale?
No earthquake can be Richter 10.0, and that's in the design. I understand that DA is also a logarithmic scale but clearly not one robust enough to prevent this constant renormalisation.
-
Hi Oscar,
I answered a similar question to this a week or 2 ago but cant find it. Ill keep trying but here goes again
Moz Authority shouldn't be compared a month to month basis. It is not a direct reflection of how well or badly your website is doing. What it is, is an indication of how much authority you have COMPARED to other websites.
Lets say facebook is the top website and has 5000 links pointing to it. This means that DA 100 = 5000 links
During the same month your own website has 500 links. And is DA 30.The following month facebook gains 1000 links. The benchmark for DA 100 now = 6000 links. Your own website gained 10 link but your DA dropped to 25.
Your website hasn't changed and you own backlink profile got stronger. However you lost DA. This is because the "standard" got higher. Likewise if the best website lost 1000 links and you did nothing your DA would climb.
As such you can't compare it month to month, but should compared it verses your competitors. As you saw from your attachment, all the website you are tracking dropped. So in relation to your direct competition you are still fine, there is nothing to worry about.
I would suggest that you consider the time of year. As Christmas approaches the internet goes link crazy as they begin to advertise and all sorts of reviews and recommendation are made. As such expect the best website particularly to gain massive amounts of links, this in turn increases the "standard". The result is, all website that havn't built as many links that month experience a drop in DA.
As long as you havn't experienced massive drops compared to competitors i wouldn't worry.
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
-
Unsolved Can I get Moz keywords via API?
Hi, my boss is asking if you "have any API for keyword research -- e.g., as soon as a user creates a card title in [our application], we can auto-recommend keywords from Moz within [the application]. I shared a link with him to your Links API page, but he says he doesn't think that API does the above. Can you help? Thank you, Renae
API | | CarolinaRen0 -
My DA dropped suddenly
Hi Everyone! DA of my site dropped from 7 to 1. I don't know what is the reason behind it? Can you tell me what is the main reason of dropping down?
API | | lucas77861 -
Moz got problem crawling SquareSpace websites?
Moz sent us an email about our website https://www.openhill.com that they failed to crawl. I checked the forums with the same issues with mine and it looks like that Moz has problems with websites from Squarespace. I wonder if you do have a workaround on this. Let me know if you have instructions for me to fix this kind of issue. Thanks!
API | | leahdickey0 -
September's Mozscape Update Broke; We're Building a New Index
Hey gang, I hate to write to you all again with more bad news, but such is life. Our big data team produced an index this week but, upon analysis, found that our crawlers had encountered a massive number of non-200 URLs, which meant this index was not only smaller, but also weirdly biased. PA and DA scores were way off, coverage of the right URLs went haywire, and our metrics that we use to gauge quality told us this index simply was not good enough to launch. Thus, we're in the process of rebuilding an index as fast as possible, but this takes, at minimum 19-20 days, and may take as long as 30 days. This sucks. There's no excuse. We need to do better and we owe all of you and all of the folks who use Mozscape better, more reliable updates. I'm embarassed and so is the team. We all want to deliver the best product, but continue to find problems we didn't account for, and have to go back and build systems in our software to look for them. In the spirit of transparency (not as an excuse), the problem appears to be a large number of new subdomains that found their way into our crawlers and exposed us to issues fetching robots.txt files that timed out and stalled our crawlers. In addition, some new portions of the link graph we crawled exposed us to websites/pages that we need to find ways to exclude, as these abuse our metrics for prioritizing crawls (aka PageRank, much like Google, but they're obviously much more sophisticated and experienced with this) and bias us to junky stuff which keeps us from getting to the good stuff we need. We have dozens of ideas to fix this, and we've managed to fix problems like this in the past (prior issues like .cn domains overwhelming our index, link wheels and webspam holes, etc plagued us and have been addressed, but every couple indices it seems we face a new challenge like this). Our biggest issue is one of monitoring and processing times. We don't see what's in a web index until it's finished processing, which means we don't know if we're building a good index until it's done. It's a lot of work to re-build the processing system so there can be visibility at checkpoints, but that appears to be necessary right now. Unfortunately, it takes time away from building the new, realtime version of our index (which is what we really want to finish and launch!). Such is the frustration of trying to tweak an old system while simultaneously working on a new, better one. Tradeoffs have to be made. For now, we're prioritizing fixing the old Mozscape system, getting a new index out as soon as possible, and then working to improve visibility and our crawl rules. I'm happy to answer any and all questions, and you have my deep, regretful apologies for once again letting you down. We will continue to do everything in our power to improve and fix these ongoing problems.
API | | randfish11 -
Domain Authority Decreased on May 5 Update
Why the Domain Authority of my website decreased? Last month my website www.i-phony.com domain authority was 32/100. but today I see the result is only 23/100 . What was the reason behind this big decrease !! Your answer is highly appreciated and very valuable for me. Best regards
API | | iphony0 -
About Expiry of MOZ API authentication and MOZ API call in .NET application
MOZ API signed authentication is getting expire after particular time, and coming up with the error "Authentication has expired , Re-send your authentication". **right now we are getting new authentication details using ** https://moz.com/products/api/keys after doing login. but, how do we get new credentials (authentication details) , by doing MOZ API call using c# or any other programming language, we are using this API in .NET. Also, How we can increase the session expiry time. i think it is concerned with the Sample Expires of Signed authentication , but we are unable to change it , as it is coming with the authentication failed.
API | | BenuAggarwal0 -
Can any of the MOZ APIs give me the top 10 google results for a keyword?
I'd like to feed a list of keywords into the Moz API and get back a list of the websites that appear on the first page for that keyword. Can anyone tell me if this is possible?
API | | amchapel0