Big drop in Domain authority : Languages school in Brazil

[Bartbijen]

Hi, I notice today strange update on the DA of our website and competitors website as well.

• caminhoslanguages.com (our website) : drop from 26 to 19
• bridgebrazil.com : drop from 29 to 26
• rioandlearn.com : drop from 19 to 14
• carioca-languages.com : drop from 22 to 15

DA drop affect all website, but bridgebrazil.com less than the other.

bridgebrazil is close now. the website is rank first, but it is a business that no longer exist. thay rank first, only because it belong to an international company that have other languages schools in different countries, providing them a huge based of links high DA.

Sorry to tell you, with this new update you totally miss the point. In which sense does the DA represent the quality of the websites ?? Is it not fair for small school, trying hard to get excelent website to get penalized like this, because it is really hard for them to get link from very high PA pages you know ?

Could somebody give explication? If you would like to improve your algorithms, I would suggest to reduce the values of the links from companies internal linking. Because it provide unfair advantage for small business.

[Bartbijen]

Here there is more information answering the question.

https://moz.com/community/q/is-everybody-seeing-da-pa-drops-after-last-moz-api-update

[Bartbijen]

Moz is only fallowing the update from google. there are not responsible.

I agree to penalized low quality links. but it should be fair. When it comes to high DA links, because, for a small business they are hard to get. so when a multi-national competitor come with thousands of links out of nowhere on few high DA website, it should be penalized as well.

[Bartbijen]

thanks for your answer. We came to the same conclusion as you.

Still pisses me off how these multinationals come and change the policies and throw years of work in the dustbin. IF it would be fair it would be ok.

we will continue to works Purely on quality links and not cheap stuff to improve our position.

[DmitriiK]

Well, I'm not an engineer at MOZ, so I don't know how exactly they calculate things, so it's only my hypothesis

[Bartbijen]

I don't agree how the update have been made. Bridge brasil might have better backlink profile, but when you look at the detail, how the links are counted, you will see they don't have so much quality links, instead thousand of link coming from only 4 high DA domains. (see screenshot)

view?usp=sharing

[Hurf]

Bear in mind that the Mozscape API Index was updated on 26th August. The day your sites (and other) sites dropped a few points. Thanks to ViviCa1 for posting a reference to this, elsewhere.

See here for details and date for next scheduled update: https://moz.com/products/api/updates

I'd second what Dmitrii says about backlink profile for site that dropped the least.

[DmitriiK]

I'd say they have better SEO/backlink profile. Basically, if there was no drop, their DA would have gone up.

[Bartbijen]

Any idea why bridgebrazil.com, went down less than the other website ?

[Hurf]

Others are seeing the same thing after recent update.  See: https://moz.com/community/q/is-everybody-seeing-da-pa-drops-after-last-moz-api-update. Seeing it happen in proportion across a number of sites (and their competitors) suggest that this is an internal adjustment within the Moz API. If it was you alone (and your site alone) I'd be much more concerned. As that isn't the case I wouldn't worry. Let's see if we get any answers from Moz staff regarding any such adjustments.

[DmitriiK]

Howdy.

So, here is a thing about DA - it's relative metric, meaning that when the 100 DA websites get more "goodies" to it, it can't get more than 100 DA, right, so, instead of increasing 100 DA to 103, let's say, MOZ reduces the DA of other websites. Makes sense?

And since your competitor and your website had relatively same drop, that's my bet on what happened. Unless, in fact, you guys did something (you and competitors, which is unlikely), what reduced all of yours DA.

Hope this helps