Large Domain Authority Drop - Please Help
-
Hey there all,
We are having the toughest time trying to figure out why our domain authority went from 12 to 3 with a search visibility score of literally zero. Back in Feb when the D.A.'s were all updated, we went down while all our competitors went up. We've been stuck at 3 for a few months and we can't understand why and aren't sure if we are dealing with a penalty of sorts.
www.skycraftstudios.com is our site.
We have a total of 60 some odd links in Search Console (some are garbage that we have disavowed, others are quality) but none of them are getting picked up in the newer MoZ index.
We have added a few quality links lately, and even sped up our site quite a bit in conjunction with standard best practice optimizations, and even added an SSL cert, yet we stuck at a terrible D.A. of 3 and aren't even able to get into the top 10 pages of our main targeted term which seems incredibly odd to us. The site has been up for almost 2 years.
Could this be simply a matter of not enough quality inbound links from the index? Any insight here would be appreciated.
-
Hello,
I ran your site through ahref.com and saw 16 backlinks, when I looked at follow backlinks I saw 10, of those 10 backlinks I see that 8 of those 10 backlinks contain the same anchor text for the same article " The Great History Freeze to preserve photographic negatives: Join The Great History Freeze and help preserve a collection of invaluable and irreplaceable negatives. "
This I'd imagine is what is costing you your DA drop, since you basically have 3 follow backlinks, if google is even counting that as legitimate links. You could be suffering a negative SEO issue from those domains using the same text, as well it seems pretty spammy. Now a days google seems to be counting backlinks that are bad less or not at all. I'd imagine that this would be the case and could bet a DA increase would happen if you could acquire even 3 to 5 more backlinks from legit sources.
So far, I've seen more correlation between DA and backlinks than I have DA and SEO. I see sites with crap for SEO but a decent backlink profile climb higher and faster in DA than a site with epic SEO and a handful of backlinks or even hundreds of crap backlinks. Quality always matters over quantity.
-
Hi Nathanial,
Looking at your site I cant see a great deal of issues with it at all. A few things that I always swear by is to remember the basics. Although there is a lot on ongoing debate as to whether a H1 on the site is useful, it does give the page a key focus.
With regards to the content on your page, it all looks great but as you have not specified a H1 I would worry about the use of your brand name within the content.
I have done some analysis and I can see you Brand name appears 202 times on your home page, this may be seen from search engines as intentionally stuffing so my advice would be to remove the excessive us of the brand name.
I hope that helps and good luck getting back up to a good score.
-
Have you got a link to your site? I'd happily have a quick look around your site if you want from an on-site perspective? (If you don't want to post it publicly please do pm me it)
-
Hey Thomas,
Thanks for the response. Our organic traffic has been fairly anemic since it's inception so it's honestly hard to tell but it did go down slightly in Feb when we dropped in D.A. We have the site optimized as best we can (hopefully not over optimized).
The strange thing is that this time last year we were performing better than we are today organically. Our competitors are also all performing better and we aren't showing up for any of our terms in the top 5 pages whatsoever which leads me to believe something else is going on here. We have decent content compared to some competitors even on page 1 and a few of them don't even have an impressive number of back links either yet they are ranking well and we aren't ranking at all...not even in the top 100 for a lot of our main terms...even our local terms like "denver video production company" which is our main target. We should easily be ranking somewhere for that term since it's so localized even if was 50 that would at least be something. Can't figure it out.
I honestly feel like if we wiped out all of our backlinks at this point, we would probably be doing better than we are now because it doesn't get much worse than D.A. 3 with zero search visibility.
-
As the moz index grows in size, Moz may have crawled some lower quality sites that have actually lowered your domain authority.
Have you seen an actual drop in traffic? As whilst Moz is a useful metric, the truly important metric is rankings/traffic.
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
-
Moving From HubSpot Help
I am migrating from hubspot to wordpress. How do i do this so i maintain my previous seo efforts. I have about 10 optimized blog posts. Can i cut and paste them into the wordpress blog or use a 301 url rewrite? Add to domain? Totally clueless! Your Noobian Friend! Jay
Technical SEO | | freshairtech0 -
301 redirect after penalty to domain which currently 301 to the penalised domain
Hello all, As I have mentioned in another Q&A, one of our new clients got hit by manual penalty. I checked their link profile and there was a lot of black hat involved. Long story sort, I submitted a reconsiderationr equest which was not enough as it seems 99,9% of his links are bad links. We took the decision to move a newly launched web site from www.websitename.com to www.website-name.com with the latter being an old domain name with good authority and clean link profile. The problem is that at the moment the www.website-name.com is set to 301 redirect to www.websitename.com and what we want to do now is take the web site off www.websitename.com and launch (not 301 as we dont want to pass the penalty to the clean domain) it to www.website-name.com. What is the best practise for this particular case and are there any things i should pay attention to? I would appreciate your advise!
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
Registering expired domains
Hi there, I've found a good domain that is available for a new project. It has been expired for about 4 months or so. It has a couple of links, with the domain name as an anchor, nothing horrible. Will buying a domain like this be safe from an seo perspective? I'm guessing it would be treated the same as buying a new domain that has never been registered before, Would I be right? Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Please help me critique my friends site
Hi All, I've regularly helped others on this forum when they've asked for tips on how to improve a specific site's SEO. Now I'm asking for the favour in return 🙂 My friend has come to me with a site (http://www.swishplastic.com.au) and asked me to help with SEO and on-page optimisation. I've got a few of my own ideas but there may be a few key things I'm overlooking. If anyone could give a few pointers, it would be much appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | bradkrussell0 -
Is Buying Domains Good For SEO? Can I 301 redirect domains to an Original website?
I have a friend that purchased multiple domains related to their website. Each of these domains have the back ground of the original website and irrelevant content on them. Is is possible to redirect the various domains to certain pages on the original website. For example if the website is www.shoes.com and they purchased domains such as www.leathermensshoes.com and a few others related to the website. Is it SEO friendly to link the domains purchased to the original website?
Technical SEO | | TSpike10 -
A website that will not load on a particular computer? Help Me Please!
We took on a new client about two weeks ago, took them off a proprietary CMS, placed them on a WordPress site, optimized the site, etc. and were finishing up small details three days ago. My PC in my personal office all of a sudden would not load the site from a Google search, from a direct url, etc.
Technical SEO | | RobertFisher
Our office was using a D-Link wireless router but my PC is hardwired in the office. I cranked up my MacBook Pro with solid state drive (6 months old), got on wireless, and....site would not load. PC's and Macs in offices around me would all load the site. A search online brought up a fix for the PC and tried it - did not work, had lead dev try it - did not work, called a server side friend and he had never heard of such a thing. Every fix revolved around changing IP addresses, etc. I uninstalled my antivirus programs on my PC, installed every update that was outstanding, there was no new software installed on either box prior to problem. Can you help??? Is there any chance someone not associated with us and just looking for my client or someone entering a direct url could experience?0 -
Keyword rich domains
Hi, Our site is beingthere.com.au We are in the business of video conferencing in Australia. I was wondering if there would be any benefit of purchasing keyword rich domains such as www.videoconferencing.net.au www.video streaming.net.au What would be the benefit(s)? And How would I go about using these domains to maximise SEO benefit? Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | dantmurphy0 -
A client will be translating their entire site into French in addition to English. For SEO purposes, should I host it on the same domain or create its own dedicated domain?
The current site is a long-standing site with good authority and a good number of links. Thanks....
Technical SEO | | JamesBSEO0