Much better authority and content than some competitors, why do they appear first?

[PauloSilveira]

On august we have lost the top positions for some keywords. Our website authority is 62 (google page rank 5), and some quite small competitors appear first now (some of them have authority 22, google page rank 3!).

Our only big change was the DNS server, from godaddy to dnsimple.com, which seems to be some milisseconds slower.

Every other metric is in our favor: from on-page repports to site speed. Sometimes by a factor of 3 or 4. What can be happening? We have also realized that, in private browsing, rankings will change a little bit in different cities, even if they are quite close to each other.

[William.Lau]

How long has it been since DNS change?

[PauloSilveira]

Thanks William. But WMT does not say a single word about penalties for this domains.

[William.Lau]

I would check WMT if there are any penalties on your domain.

Switching DNS usually will not cause any problem, there may be a delay due to DNS propagation and maybe Google crawled your site when it was down.

And authority and pagerank does not necessarily mean you will rank better but are just numbers to give you an idea. You can totally be in penalty with Google and have a PR7 and DA 70.

You need to see what your WMT says in messages and search impression numbers.