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
-
Moz Domain Authority 27
Hi there, I have been reading up about Domain Authority being important to rank though I have a question about it. When trying a few google searches and using a tool to see the Moz Domain Authority i notice the following. I won't mention sites or keywords, happy to send them via private message if required. A site ranks 1st position for most keywords including the main keyword that related to their industry, a highly competitive keyword. Their Moz Domain Authority 27, Est. Visits: 265,000, Pinterest shares 72, Facebook shares 191 and unique domains that point to it are 55. Yet when I look at another site, optimising for the same keyword, Moz Domain Authority 50, Est. Visits: 60,000, Pinterest shares 35000, Facebook shares 20000 and unique domains that point to it are 521. I would have thought that the second site ranks 1st for the keyword and the first one mentioned which is in 1st position I would have expected to be on page two or three. as I scroll down the first page for the term, all sites except for one have higher DA, visits, shares and so on. If a high PA is required can someone help me to understand the above example? Whn a low PA site ranks much better for a primary keyword than all other sites that have a higher PA than it?
Moz Pro | | IvanaDaulay1 -
Seeing steady drop in Domain Authority?
Hi! I'm working with a client that has seen a steady drop in their domain authority over the past year and a half. They were at 75 in October '13 and now they're down to 67. The drop seems rather steady over this time, no big dip. They've actually worked their crawl errors during this time and have reduced a ton of them. I can't figure out why this metric would be dropping. Anyone know of something measurable I can look at to help pinpoint the problem (and of course actions to fix it)? Thanks so much!
Moz Pro | | Becky_Converge
Becky0 -
Competitive Domain Analysis.. Can anyone explain this
As you can see from the following 3 images below that 3 out of 4 companies have declined in Domain Authority however one has managed to actually increase and stay up. Can anyone explain how this may be for the company that has stayed up has lost total external followed link and has only increased linking C-block domains by 1 uLTyDWz,QvBCoka,xT1rsod#2 uLTyDWz,QvBCoka,xT1rsod#1 uLTyDWz,QvBCoka,xT1rsod#0
Moz Pro | | MeteorElec0 -
Which domain to use? nichecity.es , nichecity.net or niche.cat ?
Hi, I must warm you that I am lame as hell in this SEO buisness. I just kinda made (not finished yet) my first wordpress site for a female art therapist friend of mine based in Barcelona, Spain who wants to have an internet presence and get some consulting clients. I made a little research through adwords keyword tool and found out "arteterapia barcelona" (medium competence, 390 local searches) is a reasonable niche with medium competence (0,62) but the other keywords are just for people trying to know what art therapy is or try to become art therapist themselves (cursos -courses-, master, etc). Then there is "arte terapia barcelona" which gives roughly the same results (high competence -0,72-, 390 local searches). She is not ready yet to offer courses and anyway I thought I would focus on organic positioning her with keywords "arteterapia barcelona" and maybe "arte terapia barcelona" but do a multilngual website as it is an added asset for customers. My guess is people who look for an arttherapist in Barcelona use these keywords: either "arteterapia barcelona" or "arte terapia barcelona" (in english "arttherapy barcelona") as "arteterapeuta barcelona" (in english, "art therapist barecelona") gives NO RESULTS whatsoever ¿??¿? So I (maybe a mistake to start with) got some free webspace from 000webhost.com and the free domain arteterapia.hostoi.com , installed wordpress and built a website from scratch with a variation of twenty eleven wordpress theme. When I realized arteterapia.cat was still available I kinda panicked and bought it right away (maybe a mistake). But as I want to organically position arteterapia AND barcelona I bought arteterapiabarcelona.es and .net (com is not available). The thing is, I don't know which one to use or them all. Frankly, I don't know where to start. Should I try to position each page separately? Or just alternate using "arte terapia" and "arteterapia" throughout the site? Should my priority now be to choose one of these (probably arteterapiabarcelona.es) and try to get some backlinks or use them all? Are.cat domains as powerful for people doing searches in catalonia region as .es for people doing searches in spain? Should she use Adsense? Any good tutorial on how to calculate the cost of that¿ Sorry again for the probably lame questions. And thanks. I do appreciate your help A LOT. Miguel
Moz Pro | | roybati0 -
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 are our competitors getting these inbound linking domains?
I'm currently managing SEO for my company's website, and I'm getting into link building for the first time. As part of the process, I'm using Open Site Explorer to see who's linking into our competitor sites, to get a better sense of what's available to us in our particular avenue of e-commerce. However, I'm finding that our competitors are getting inbound links from high-authority sites pretty far afield from selling jewelry - census.gov, parallels.com, warnerbros.com, and others. I try clicking through to these links, but each link starts a download of a file. I've seen .f4v, .7z, and .apk files listed as inbound links to our competitor. How is this happening? Again, I'm new to link building, so there may be a simple answer here, and if so I apologize for asking. However, this seems really strange to me, and a difficult situation to confront.
Moz Pro | | jozaksut0 -
Were do I find the old Link Scape report that shows Domain Juice passed?
It looks like they are retiring the old Link scape. Where do we find the report that showed the Domain Juice passed by each link? Is it in the advanced reports and we need to request and wait?
Moz Pro | | MBayes0 -
Where has my Domain Authority gone?
Currently my Domain Authority is at 36, I believe earlier this week it was at 39 and a few months ago it was 41 but I have no way of checking the Domain Authority history. Why would my website's Domain Authority go down like this? I was hit pretty hard (well not so hard compared to other sites, but It feels pretty hard) by Panda 2.0 and I have been making many changes. However, I am 301 redirecting the few removed pages. All paginated pages (page 2,3 etc of each category) I have changed to "noindex, follow" meta tags. For all "thin content' pages I am also using "noindex, follow". And all possible duplicated content I am also using "noindex, follow". So the link juice should still be flowing. So where is my domain authority going? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | donthe1