Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Help! My Domain Authority keeps dropping! What do I do?
-
Hey!
I just noticed my Domain Authority keeps dropping? What's happening? What do I do to get it better. I'm scared and dont know the next move to make to get this site better. Help please!
Thanks!
Kristy O
-
If you're just getting started, I'd recommend the Beginner's Guide - http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
Also - You'll want to make sure you've 301 redirected all of your pre-existing .asp URLs to your new .php URLs. You'll lose all of your incoming links with the URL changes unless you are using an extensionless structure.
-
Haha many moons?
I dig the SEO stuff so far, gonna stay with it for sure. But my home still lies in Adobe Suite I think.
-
Thanks!
Ya, it's been 2 since I got the site in May.
I'll be starting to go over the Open Site Explorer stuff now. I have a feeling stuff that was done before is showing up for me now.
Thanks again!
-
That's how I got started many moons ago.
-
Yes, I was on the webinar too
Lots of helpful info, wish I could implement all of it.
Thank you for your help! I've been changing parts of the site a lot lately... I completely redesigned the site from asp to php this past may, and have taken it completely over since. So I'm really trying to figure out what's lingering from before and what I can do to make it better. I'm just starting in the SEO world, from a designer background
-
You're welcome Kristy, I'll have my fingers crossed that you see a nice jump up next month
Anything I can ever help with just give me a shout on here, or tweet me @mrdavidingram
David
-
Thank you!
-
I'm not sure you really have any sort of problem at all. Unless you have seen a fall in traffic/ranking etc then I wouldn't worry. DA calculations seem to lag what Google is doing anyway, so if you have not suffered in terms of traffic/ranking then I wouldn't worry at all.
DA is just an indicative metric about your domain, the end goal is conversions, so worry about it if those are hit but otherwise - stay calm and carry on (I should get that on a T-Shirt or something!)
Gary
-
Hi Kristy,
The first thing I would do would use the tool here called Open Site Explorer and or use link:yourdomain.com to check all the sites linking to your site. loosing domain authority could be for a number of different issues but one could be some bad or non relevant links linking to your site. I would also use Google webmaster tools just to check the general health of your site and request a SEOmoz Crawl of your site. All of this data combined will give you a good starting point to what might be going wrong. I see you have a google page rank of 2 at the moment, what was it before?
Hope this helps.
Kindest Regards,
Craig
-
First - stay calm. Is your traffic noticeably dropping? Have you been penalized in any way in the SERPs? If not, you might just be experiencing regular fluctuations and have nothing to worry about. Look at that first.
Next, I'm assuming you have a Pro campaign set up.
The first course of action there would be to analyze your warnings, errors and notifications to minimize those. Fix the low-hanging fruit there and move on. Next, make sure you're following proper on-page SEO architecture throughout your site. Proper titles, H1s, interlinking, hierarchy, sitemapping, etc.
Now analyze your link profile. Do you have a lot of low quality links? If so, you may need to do some cleanup.
Additionally, you're in an e-commerce sector, so you may also want to check out the most recent Pro webinar - http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues
There are a number of things that can contribute to this. Without more information, all I can tell you is to start with the basics and move up. Have you made any significant changes lately?
-
Hi Kristy,
The first thing to say is that Domain Authority is a third party metric, so unless you have seen a drop in your traffic then there should be no need for immediate alarm. Although DA correlates with successful rankings, there is still no guarantee that a change in DA will effect your rankings in any way.
The solution for your issue might be quite simple. In last months update the number of links in the index was around 50% smaller than the previous update. This meant that a lot of links that where contributing towards your DA score are no longer in SeoMoz's index, and can therefore not contribute towards your DA score.
In no way does this mean that these links are no longer in Google, as the Google index and the Mozscape index are two entirely separate entities and are in no way connected.
After this month's update, it has been noted that the index is even smaller than last month (albeit by a much smaller margin). If you read the Q&A entries following last month’s update you'll see lots of people asking the same question, and it was confirmed that the drop in DA was due to the smaller index.
I expect we'll see the same over the next week.
Personally, I saw my clients DA drop by an average of 3-4 points.
If your drop in score correlates with this pattern, then you have nothing to worry about at all. Especially if your traffic hasn't been effected.
Here are the details of the smaller update from last month:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/july-mozscape-update
And here are this month’s details:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/august-mozscape-update
If your drop in score doesn't coincide with this, then it most likely means that you've lost one/some links that were contributing to your overall Domain Authority score. You can get to the bottom of this by using the historical link date in Majestic to figure out what links where lost, and when.
If this is the case then you can either try and rebuild the lost links, or create some new ones. Or ideally, both!
Best of luck.
David
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
-
Switching URLs after acquisition to retain domain authority?
Hey everyone! My company just acquired our biggest competitor and we're switching to their platform because they have a better technical structure for SEO--what's the best way to do that, other than a 301 redirect? Can we even rename their domain to ours? How do we ensure we keep both our and their domain authority and SEO juice? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | genevieveagar0 -
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
:Pointing hreflang to a different domain
Hi all, Let's say I have two websites: www.mywebsite.com and www.mywebsite.de - they share a lot of content but the main categories and URLs are almost always different. Am I right in saying I can't just set the hreflang tag on every page of www.mywebsite.com to read: rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http://mywebsite.de' /> That just won't do anything, right? Am I also right in saying that the only way to use hreflang properly across two domains is to have a customer hreflang tag on every page that has identical content translated into German? So for this page: www.mywebsite.com/page.html my hreflang tag for the german users would be: <link < span="">rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http://mywebsite.de/page.html' /></link <> Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee1590 -
Removing poor domain authority backlinks worth it?
Hey Moz, I am working with a client on more advanced SEO tactics. This client has a reputable domain authority of 67 and 50,000+ backlinks. We're wanting to continue SEO efforts and stay on top of any bad backlinks that may arise. Would it be worth asking websites (below 20 domain authority) to remove our links? Then, use the disavow tool if they do not respond. Is this a common SEO practice for continued advanced efforts? Also, what would your domain authority benchmark be? I used 20 just as an example. Thanks so much for your help. Cole
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColeLusby1 -
Community inside the domain or in a separate domain
Hi there, I work for an ecommerce company as an online marketing consultant. They make kitchenware, microware and so on. The are reviewing their overall strategy and as such they want to build up a community. Ideally, they would want to have the community in a separate domain. This domain wouldn't have the logo of the brand. This community wouldn't promote the brand itself. The brand would post content occassionally and link the store domain. The reasoning of this approach is to not interfere in the way of the community users and also the fact that the branded traffic acquired doesn't end up buying at the store I like this approach but I am concerned because the brand is not that big to have two domains separated and lose all the authority associated with one strong domain. I would definitely have everything under the same domain, store and community, otherwise we would have to acquire traffic for two domains. 1. What do you think of both scenarios, one domain versus two? Which one is better? 2. Do you know any examples of ecommerce companies with successful communities within the store domain? Thanks and regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footd0 -
Drop in traffic after redesign
Is it common for a site to see slight traffic drops after a site redesign (containing cleaner code, more usability and basically just being more helpful for the end user)? A new site of ours went live last Wednesday and has experienced a drop in traffic. If you have seen this in your own site, how did you recover? And how long did the recovery take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Domain Alias SEO
We have 5 domain alias of our existing sites
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unibiz
All 5 domain alias are domain alias of our main site. It means, all domain alias will have exactly same site and contents
Like Main domain: www.mywebsite.com
DomainAlias: www.myproduct.com, www.myproduct2.com, www.myproduc3.com
And if anybody will open our site www.myproduct.com, it will open same website which I have in primary site what can i do to rank all website without any penalty....i s there any way? This is domain alias of in hosting industry Thanks0 -
How do I list the subdomains of a domain?
Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler0