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
-
Can you see changes in page authority quarterly?
Is there any definitive answer to when page authority can change? I'm trying to see if it's a trackable metric but not sure since (I believe) it's something that takes time. Is there any article/reference that speaks to the fact that the page authority can take time to change? I do know that changes to the page, competitors pages and a multitude of factors go into the score, but I'm trying to see if there is a 'simple' answer for the timing of the scoring.
Moz Pro | | AvexHomes0 -
PA up for one domain and still no movement on the other two!
Hey guys! Just wanted to see if anyone can help me on this one! I have zenory.co.nz the PA on this is 21 and DA is 10 however my other two domains com and com.au have been stagnant at both PA and DA at 1 - any reason why this might be?
Moz Pro | | edward-may0 -
Drop in domain authority for myself and all my competitors, was something changed?
On the 1/11 report all four websites dropped, and starting on 2/12 they all dropped a few more times. These are all large companies who are completely white hat. Was something changed? The reason I asked is all of our linking C-Blocks dropped as well. Mine dropped from 114 to 42 and I have no idea why. All of my competitors dropped as well, is this related?
Moz Pro | | EcommerceSite1 -
Confused on setting up my domain in a campaign
I have a website that is www.example.com. When I first setup my campaign in SEOMoz, I missed the instructions that stated I need to set up my domain as it appeared in the browser. Thus, I set it up as example.com. When I realized my mistake, I setup a second campaign as www.example.com and am running them side by side to see the differences. My question has to do with the best setup. I have a blog that is a subdomain as blog.example.com. It appears that the www.example.com campaign is not crawling the blog pages but example.com is. Are there any downsides in setting up this campaign as example.com? I have a number of other sites with the same issue so would like to get this resolved before I setup the additional sites. Thanks for any assistance or insights into ways I may be "shooting myself in the foot" with the wrong domain structure in my campaign settings.
Moz Pro | | rfwood0 -
Issue getting total links, page & domain authority
Hi guys, I am trying to get total links, page & domain authority using the API. I am requesting the following columns: Cols=6871947673632768328204816384343597383681653687091214 { "fjid": 207343179, "ued": 43324279, "pib": 255645, "ptrr": 0.0056131743357352125, "fmrp": 8.246626591590841, "unid": 954915, "fjf": 4003651, "fjr": 0.00040067116628622016, "ftrp": 8.308303969566644, "ftrr": 0.0012189619975325583, "fejp": 9.265328830369816, "pnid": 45883246, "fjd": 2480265, "ujfq": 1277385, "pjip": 1230240, "fjp": 9.586342983782004, "fuid": 294877628, "uu": "www.google.com/", "pejr": 0.0004768398971363439, "ufq": "www.google.com/", "pejp": 9.647424778525615, "ujp": 300689, "utrp": 7.916901429865898, "ptrp": 9.487254666203722, "utrr": 0.001639219985667878, "fmrr": 0.000731592927123369, "pda": 100, "pjd": 5600882, "ulc": 1342758719, "fnid": 12165784, "fejr": 0.00016052965883996156, "ujb": 107264 } I cannot see the UPA column returned in the JSON object. Im using 34359738368 for the UPA column. I need to retrieve the three fields (page authority, domain authority and total links) in the same query. Is it possible?
Moz Pro | | Srvwiz0 -
When to stop link building because page authority is low - open site explorer
Hi, I'm link building with Open Site Explorer. I'm really picky in get links from only high quality sites. When do you stop going down the list of possible backlink providers because the page authority is too low. I usually stop at 40, but what do you do, why, and what does it depend on?
Moz Pro | | BobGW0 -
How to crawl the whole domain?
Hi, I have a website an e-commerce website with more than 4.600 products. I expect that Seomoz scan check all url's. I don't know why this doesn't happens. The Campaign name is Artigos para festa and should scan the whole domain festaexpress.com. But it crels only 100 pages I even tried to create a new campaign named Festa Express - Root Domain to check if it scans but had the same problem it crawled only 199 pages. Hope to have a solution. Thanks,
Moz Pro | | EduardoCoen
Eduardo0 -
Is there any way to change the domain in a campaign here?
When I started the campaign I used site.com but now I have an external blog at blog.site.com and is hosted on tumblr. This site gets lots of errors showing on the campaign because insists on following no-follows. If I change the campaign to www.site.com then blog.site.com will not be part of the campaign. It does say in the help that it will NOT track sub-domains, but it does and hence my problem. So, I am not sure if the rest of the info there is old. 'Does the Web App track the subdomains of my campaign’s domain?
Moz Pro | | oznappies
A. Unfortunately we do not currently track subdomains as a part of the
domain you enter. Instead, you must create another campaign slot for any
subdomains you wish to track.' Any ideas on where or how to do this?0