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
-
Sudden Drop from #1 to #12
Hello Moz community,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marcmayo
I am really happy to be here and I start right away with a quite tricky question I'd say. We are running Star-Registration.com and in March switched platforms to Shopify. All the Redirects etc were done according to standards. Nevertheless, Star-Registration.com dropped in May (2 months after the switch) for "name a star" and "buy a star" from #1 to the 2nd Page of Google Results after being on #1 for almost 3 consecutive years. We had a similar case with their german website but the german one is back on the top 3 rankings again for all the important keywords. I attached a Screenshot of the Search Console stats
Any suggestions? yv6pep0 -
Will using a reverse proxy give me the benefits of the main sites domain authority?
If I am running example.com and have a blog on exampleblog.com Will moving the blog to example.com/blog and using a reverse proxy give the blog the same domain authority as example.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | El-Bracko0 -
Migrating to a new domain
Hi The company I work for are planing to re-brand & come under our parent company name. This means the whole site will be moved to a new domain. Does anyone have any experience with this and can give me some useful docs to read/any advice? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Content question please help
Would content behind a drop down on this site Https://www.homeleisuredirect.com/pool_tables/english_pool_tables/ you have to click the - more about English pool tables text under the video Work just as well for SEO as content on the page like this site http://www.pooltablesonline.co.uk/uk-slate-bed-pool-tables.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Outside Top 10 Even though - Higher Domain/Page Authority/Higher On Page Grade
Hi, Note: this is for Australian search results - for people in Perth.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HeadStud
The website is: http://thedj.com.au I am trying to optimise for the keyword 'perth wedding dj', but also 'wedding dj perth' and for some reason my website isn't even in the top 10 results. Here is what's weird though: My on-page grade with the On-Page Grader for the keyword 'wedding DJ perth' is an 'A' for http://thedj.com.au (http://awesomescreenshot.com/0135135hca) When checking the Keyword Difficulty in the Google Australia search enginge for 'wedding DJ perth' - there are 4 results which have a lower domain authority than 15 (in fact one result has a domain authority of 1) - http://awesomescreenshot.com/03f5134zd1 http://thedj.com.au has a Domain Authority of 23/100 and a Page Authority of 34/100. (http://awesomescreenshot.com/0bb5134tb8) So seeing as the page has gotten an A for on-page optimisation for the keyword 'wedding DJ Perth' and has a higher domain authority then many results in the top 10... why isn't it in the Top 10?! Bonus Question:
Why is DJ Avi showing up at the top of search results (Local listing) depsite the fact that:
a) He has no website to link to
b) No reviews for his listing
c) No keywords that I can see (other than the fact that he's a DJ)
Screenshot: http://awesomescreenshot.com/05151349cb Meanwhile our Local Places - Thanks,
Kosta
http://www.headstudios.com.au0 -
Complementary Domain
Hi guys, I have the following situation I would like some help. Because my client is in Brazil, I will make up fictional names so it's easier to understand. My client is a shoe store whose domain is mangabeira.com. That is the brand name and will always be the main domain and reference of the website. We were offered the domain shoes.com. There is no intention of changing the brand name or anything, but there would be a redirect that would send the user who to mangabeira.com. My question is how much impact would that complementary domain do to my SEO performance and how that redirect must be handled. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LucasLopes0 -
Are sub domains considered completely different than the root domain?
We have a project that is going to generate duplicate content. If we move the new content to a sub-domain (E.g. product.domain.com) will it still be considered duplicate content to the root domain? Or is it like having two completely different domains? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tripled5110 -
Seeking Help with Domain Acquisition Redirect Strategy
My company is purchasing www.boughtsite.com. This new site has multiple sub-domain sites: customsite1.boughtsite.com, customsite2.boughtsite.com, etc. 1. Is it possible to redirect everything from www.boughtsite.com to www.mycompanysite.com while leaving the other sub-domain sites active? These other sites have different audiences than our main site. 2. Would it be an okay solution to just place a link on boughtsite.com to mycompanysite.com telling visitors "We have been re-branded to My Company" 3. Can I use an i-frame to move customsite1.boughtsite.com to www.mycompanysite.com/customsite1 instead? Thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0