Domain authority get down significantly. Internal MOZ Issue? Google Algoritm Update?
-
I've noticed that several websites have lost DA since middle of october. I attached a picture. Could be this a MOZ internal issue like happened a time ago? Not only the DA get down, I have lost C-blocks links, too
I check in http://health.moz.com/ and found this Crawl Services Outage: http://health.moz.com/incidents/fbn00m7xxzx2
But not appear to have direct relation with my question.
Or may be a google algoritm update? -
I understand your answer. I will monitor the coming months as all advances.
Rand thank you very much! -
Hi there Rand & Juan!
This is what I really love from Moz, Rand Fishkin in person answering and giving his sincere opinion about what was going wrong with Juan´s question.
Then, further on, when arguments were even more clear and consistent, he changes his opinion and therefore takes responsibility, giving his earnest point of view about possible Moz faults that are under study and certainly will be solved ASAP thus making moz a broader and more reliable tool.
Thanks for being sincere and credible, I understand that's the best way to construct a long term relationship, a widespread community and a profitable & sound company. Keep it up!!
Cheers from Southern (today not sunny) Spain.
Claudio
-
Hi Juan - If I had to guess, I'd say we probably had some issues crawling the sites where your links were (most likely errors on our end, though it's possible the sites themselves had issues, too) over the summer, and we've now rectified it. We're continuing to improve with future indices, and you should see us getting more consistent about this with each release.
-
Thank you for your answer Rand.
The DA is now rising again recovering the previous value.
Another thing that surprised me when analyzing changes DA was the large variation in total recorded by MOZ links, which is why I suspected a problem with the algorithm MOZ. I uploaded a picture to show what I mean.
In October the number of links to all the sites I'm comparing dropped a lot, and now in December rose at an even greater value than they had in July. -
Hi Dmitri and Juan - perhaps this way of explaining it will help:
A good analogy might be how rankings work for countries in various categories. For example, if Japan is ranked as having the world's best healthcare in 2015, and they improve the quality of their healthcare in 2016, are they guaranteed to still be #1?
Not necessarily.
Maybe the #2 ranked country improved even more and now Japan has fallen from #1 to #2 despite actually improving on their healthcare quality. Maybe countries 2-10 all improved dramatically and Japan's now fallen to #11 even though they technically got better, not worse.
PA and DA work in a similar fashion. Since they're scaled on a 100-point system, after each update, the recalculations mean that PA/DA for a given page/site could go down even if that page/site has improved their link quantity and quality. Such is the nature of a relative, scaled system. This is why I encourage folks strongly to watch not just PA/DA for their own pages/sites, but for a variety of competitors and sites in similar niches to see whether you're losing or gaining ground broadly in your field.
The score system has to be relative (we can't use absolutes or we wouldn't be able to have good correlations against Google - we'd just have another system that counts links or counts linking domains or the like). If PA/DA aren't working well for you as metrics, I'd encourage you to use something else - link counts or counts of linking domains/IPs or the like. The purpose of the DA/PA metrics is to track against Google, and over time, you might see lots of fluctuation up or down that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing better/worse. That's why the comparison process and understanding what the metrics do and why they're different than raw counts is important.
Hope that's helpful!
-
I'm not sure if I understand your question correctly - correct me if i'm wrong.
Well, when i say competitor, i mean your competitor. MOZ doesn't have any topical relevance algorithms in calculating DA (as far as I know and understand). So, they do crawl all links (or as much as they can) on the Internet.
Now, as why you need to look at your competitor relative changes. Basically, as Rand said here:
My strongest suggestion if you ever have the concern/question "Why did my PA/DA drop?!" is to always compare against a set of competing sites/pages. If most of your competitors fell as well, it's more likely related to relative scaling or crawl biasing issues, not to anything you've done. Remember that DA/PA are relative metrics, not absolute! That means you can be improving links and rankings and STILL see a falling DA score, but, due to how DA is scaled, the score in aggregate may be better predictive of Google's rankings.
If 100 DA websites got more links, then all other websites' DAs will drop proportinally. Therefore, if your website's DA dropped even more, something is wrong with your backlink profile.
It's quite weird, I know. I'm not sure if I can explain any better. Hope this helps.
P.S. I'll send this post link to Rand, maybe he can clarify more.
-
ok, i understand. When you say "your competitor" DA went down you want to say the specific competence for each market niche or to all the urls on the internet. I.e., MOZ compare the DA with all the internet urls or his algoritm detect some kind of topic to determine the domain autorithy?
-
Hi. Exact opposite, my friend. When highest DA domains get a lot more links, it affects every other domain (unless your domains are 100DA). Basically, what you need to look at is relative change of tracked domains' DA to each other. If your domain went down 2 points and your competitor's went down 5 points - good for you. if opposite - not so good for you
I understand that it's quite confusing and i i don't really understand why MOZ sticks to relative DA scoring, but that's what we have to work with.
Hope this helps.
-
Hi, thank you for answer. I read that article but i dont understand yet why all the domains that i show on the picture went down their DA. I think that is not due to highest DA domains gaining lots more links, it could be for one, not for all..
-
Hi there.
Please read this pinned post by Rand (point #2): https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores
As you can see several domains DAs are going down at the same time, meaning that DA change is relative due to highest DA domains gaining lots more links.
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
-
How often does Moz data update when leveraging it through Supermetrics for Datastudios?
Good Afternoon, A pretty straightforward question: How often does Moz data update when leveraging it through Super-metrics for Data studios? I noticed that the "time last crawled" metric had some URLs not crawled in over 2 months... wondering if there's a way to speed it up on Moz's end.
Moz Pro | | LoweProfero0 -
How long for authority to transfer form an old page to a new page via a 301 redirect? (& Moz PA score update?)
Hi How long aproximately does G take to pass authority via a 301 from an old page to its new replacement page ? Does Moz Page Authority reflect this in its score once G has passed it ? All Best
Moz Pro | | Dan-Lawrence
Dan3 -
Why has the Historical Domain Analysis report not updated since 11th July 2013?
I find the Historical Domain Analysis report within Moz really useful but it's stopped updating for some reason. Is anyone else seeing this? When can we next expect it to update?
Moz Pro | | TranslateMediaLtd0 -
Tracking Rankings In Google
Is there a way to see historical rankings of your site in Google. I have a site that has been running for a few years now. I want to see how are Google Ranking has performed throughout the years. We recently redesigned and suffered in rankings but I only know(from Google Analytics) What our traffic used to be, not what our rankings were .
Moz Pro | | pinksgreens0 -
SERP control panel issues
Hi I use the SERP control panel every day, but now it hardly works and only shows info for the companies who have Google Places and show in the local results. I use Google Chrome on my (old) Toshiba laptop. Are there any technical issues with the SERP control panel at the moment? Kind regards, Barnaby
Moz Pro | | FreeRangeUK1 -
Issue in number of pages crawled
i wanted to figure out how our friend Roger Bot works. On the first crawl of one of my large sites, the number of pages crawled stopped at 10000 (due to the restriction on the pro account). However after a few weeks, the number of pages crawled went down to about 5500. This number seemed to be a more accurate count of the pages on our site. Today, it seems that Roger Bot has completed another crawl and the number is up to 10000 again. I know there has been no downtime on our site, and the items that we fixed on our site did not reduce or increase the number of pages we had. Just making sure there are no known issues with Roger Bot before I look deeper into our site to see if there is an issue. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | cchhita0 -
Keyword ranking - authority information
How can you explain that a website (not mine) appears on 1st place in Google (on the Keyword Difficulty Tool/Ranking Analysis) but the Page Authority, Page Linking Root Domains, Domain Authority, and Root Domain Linking Root Domains are much lower than the other websites on the list. Even when running the On-Page Report Card, this website gets grade F comparing to the other (including mine) websites that get better grades. I just want to understand which criteria I'm missing that can explain why a website appears on first place when it seems it's not well optimized. Any input is appreciated. Thanks.
Moz Pro | | yeseniagn0 -
Domain Authority: Sites with lower numbers get higher ranking.
We had a question about your online tools for http://pro.seomoz.org/campaigns/30642 The Domain Authority for http://pucherinsurance.com/ is 67: Higher than most of our competitors such as <cite><cite>bluecross.ca which has a rank of 54. </cite> </cite> We show up lower in the actual search results. An example phrase would be Visitors to Canada health Insurance. We get an A grade for onsite reports and we are working on the duplicate content and titles. We appear to be doing everything right but still rank lower than expected. Any thoughts?
Moz Pro | | northerncs0