Large recent drop in "Domain Authority" and backlinks through OSE

[JFritton]

Hello,

I've noticed that our sites domain authority has dropped enormously this past week according to Open Site Explorer.  It also shows us as having lost about half of our backlinks.

Google webmaster tools doesn't show a corresponding drop in links and we haven't done anything to our domain recently.  Anyone have any ideas what might have happened?

Our site is at: http://www.GoldMaxUSA.com

Thanks!

[Modbargains]

301 directs coming from

www.topusagoldbuyers.com/

page 15 on Open Site Explorer with Domain Authority of 14.

As far as why the sudden drop in Domain Authority, it is due to Open Site Explorer getting around to indexing all of your backlinks from the internet. I know they hit a bump in the road recently, which stalled indexing the web for a month (or so).

What I can conclude is the backlinks to your site are causing a negative effect with so many low domain authority scores (along with Moz Trust).

One thing I do like about SEOMOZ/OSE is that their algo. method of determining authority is pretty damn close to google's.

So if you see your authority drop on open site explorer it's just as bad in google's eyes or worse.

If you don't mind me asking, what are you link building plans? I highly recommend to not outsource them to agencies..either way. PM me if you would like, private messages can be found under the "my account" and we can discuss strategies if it's something you dont want to discuss on a forum.

[JFritton]

Perfect.  Thanks Takeshi, I appreciate it.

[TakeshiYoung]

You're probably seeing the drop because SEOMoz just updated their index:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/may-mozscape-index-update164-billion-urls

The sites that are indexed are going to change between updates, and as more/different sites get changed, the values for domain authority are going to shift.  If you haven't seen a corresponding update in GWT, then don't worry about it, it probably means that nothing has changed for your site, it's OSE that's changed (similar to how toolbar Pagerank is just a snapshot of a site at a certain time).

[JFritton]

Thanks Modbargains,

I was just hired to help with SEO (I've only been here a few weeks now) and I'm working on a backlinks strategy now.   We definitely, definitely need better links with better anchor text.

My concern however is that we haven't done anything drastic over the past couple of weeks  yet we've seen a big drop in domain authority according to OSE.  I'm trying to figure out what happened.

Also, what 301 redirects are you referring to?

Thanks!

Jason

[Modbargains]

Well spending 1 minute of my time i see three issues

1. Too many No follow backlinks

2. Your keywords are primarily "WEBSITE" or "View WEBSITE" on quality sites with "no follow" links

and www.goldmaxusa.com on low quality sites with "follow" links

3. whats with the garbage 301 directs? Come on.

I amlooking at OSE with Domain Authority ranked highest to lowest.

Fix:

Get better back links ( i dont care how) and use variations of keywords you want to rank on.

"WEBSITE" is not one of them

"Gold buyer" is a somewhat ok keyword. you can do better than me

"Highest cash for gold" would be an example of a better phrased keyword variant to use.

[JFritton]

To add to this:  We have over the past 3 weeks noticed a negative SEO campaign against us.  Our press releases are being horribly spun and added to really spammy sites.  We've also seen a lot of links being added to strange porn sites.

It seems strange however that we would have seen a drop in backlinks somehow though.