Falling Domain Authority
-
What are the factors that would cause my domain authority to fall? As best I understand it, we would have to be losing links. For example, one of my clients started with a DA around 60 and now 4 months on it is sitting around 47.
This has happened with a couple clients and I'm not really sure why or how to counteract it.
-
Hi Joshua,
You are essentially correct, but it could be a number of factors. Off the top of my head, and this is by no means a complete list of possibilities, the reasons for a loss of DA could be caused by:
- As you stated, losing links. It's estimated that each year over 50% of the entire web "disappears". Most of this is junk, but it happens to good links as well
- For one reason or another, Linkscape didn't find certain links during it's last crawl of the web. They may reappear during the next update.
- The sites linking to you lost Domain Authority themselves. This would effect your score
- Natural changes in Linkscape from update to update. SEOmoz is constantly improving how it crawls the web (and sometimes there's some rough spot around the edges) which causes natural fluctuation in link metrics. When this happens, it's best to use DA not as a historical measure of your own site, but as a competitive measure against your competitors. If your DA fell, it's possible your competitors DA fell as well and you are just as strong.
More than likely, it's a combination of several factors. Usually, it's nothing to worry about unless you see it correspond to a traffic drop as well. Hopefully your DA will be back up during the next update.
-
This is a common perception, but this applies more to Page Authority than Domain Authority.
Each domain has one DA score, which applies to the entire site. Domain Authority is the "grandaddy" metric that takes all the other metrics into consideration, including Page Authority and MozTrust.
Page Authority, on the other hand, flows between individual pages. So in this situation, a large number of new pages without new links will most likely have low Page Authority, but the DA for the site as a whole remains the same.
-
According to SEOmoz there are over 150 signals included in DA calculation. Of course links would be your usual suspect here but as Phil Gross said you should revisit all the changes you've made in the past months.
-
Good add!
-
I think that another factor that could reduce domain authority is if you add a significant number of additional pages to your site without earning a proportional number of new inbound links. This would dilute the authority across the domain.
-
Joshua,
I would certainly look into where your link building strategies built your links into. There is a possibility that your site has placed inbound links on a spam site or a network that was hit. Other items may include quality level of content. If you are not using original authoritative content you could see a shit. One initial question is how has this impacted rankings for your primary keyword sets?
Revisit any work over the last 4 months you have done, you may have done some dev work that is negatively impacting you? What is your Google Webmasters Account saying? Has your page load time slowed down? Have you changed server environments? There are certainly a number of possibilities. If several of our clients are experiencing the same thing and you are hosting then look at the hosting level. If you are in a shared hosting environment then a spam site on the same server could impact you.
-Phil G
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
-
Duplicate Content Issue because of root domain and index.html
SEOMoz crawl diagnostics is suggesting that my root domain and the rootdomain/index.html are duplicate content. What can be done to ensure that both are considered as a single age only?
Moz Pro | | h1seo1 -
How to download domain authority of bulk links using paid seomoz tool?
i would like to download domain authority of 50 domains at once. Is it possible with seomoz tool? If yes, can some one tell me how to do that?
Moz Pro | | Sasank0 -
Adding Disavowed Domains to Open Site Explorer?
Hi, Is there a way to add to the OSE a list of disavowed domains? Also, how often is it refreshed?
Moz Pro | | BeytzNet
I know that the GWMT shows us links on sites that are down for months now. Thanks0 -
How can I find out why my Domain authority has gone down?
I need to find out why the domain authority has dropped 6 points in the last 6 months - any ideas where to start looking?
Moz Pro | | RedC0 -
How do I increase domain authority? Real Estate SIte
I have a site that is just a few months old. How do I get the domain authority up?
Moz Pro | | bronxpad0 -
SEOmoz Report: Competitive Domain Analysis
Hi there, According to SEOmoz Dashboard's Competitive Domain Analysis, the 'Total Links' for our domain shot up (more than quatripled) in the last few weeks. We haven't really done much link building in over 6 months so not sure how to explain this. Did SEOmoz make updates to their bots? Could it be that the bots are finding all these links only now? We've been using SEOmoz reporting for almost a year now, and I've never seen this before. Some insight / explanation for this would be great. Thanks in advance,
Moz Pro | | RBA
Gemma0 -
Root domain www subdomain only
Is there a way to set up a campaign to track the root domain and www subdomain only? Or to exclude certain subdomains from a campaign?
Moz Pro | | zingiri0 -
In OSE is there a way to see the total number or links coming from each domain?
Open site explorer will only show up to to 25 links per domain but in order to fully understand the link profile for the site I'm working on, I need to know how many links are coming from each domain - when I download the linking domains report, it doesn't contain this information. Is there a way to access it?
Moz Pro | | jabbate0