Why is my domain authority (and page authority) plummeting?

[MichaelBrown55]

In June our domain authority was at a 41. In July we were 38 and ever since then our domain authority is gradually getting worse and worse. We went from a 33 to a 29 in one week!

Possible explanations include:

• Maybe the SEO we hired (for a few months in late 2011) added our domain to some less-than-awesome directories
• The 301 redirects on our home page are hurting us somehow
• Duplicate content for URL's with different capitalization (IE: /pages/aboutus and /Pages/AboutUs)

Can someone please point me in the right direction? Which of the above possibilities would likely impact domain/page authority? Any other ideas as to why this might be happening? Any suggestions for improving our domain or page authority?

Thanks for the help!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Micheal,

Sorry to hear about your Domain Authority dropping. But this isn't always as bad as it appears. First thing is to take a deep breath. Often times these things happen for perfectly innocent reasons, and often have no relation to your website in the real world.

The important questions are: Has your traffic dropped? How about a drop in rankings? This could indicated you've truly lost a good amount of your backlink profile, and might warrant further action.

Linkscape, and Open Site Explorer, are based on link metrics, so on-page factors like duplicate content generally don't make much of an impact. If your Domain Authority dropped it could mean a few things:

1. Domain Authority is a relative metric calculated fresh with each new index, meaning you shouldn't compare the score from one index to another. Instead, you should compare your score to your competitors and look for relative movement. That said, a drop from 41 to 29 is usually a sign of something bigger.

2. Mozscape and Open Site Explorer are updated about every 4 weeks. The metrics are entirely link-based, so downtime of your server won't effect the numbers.

Because we use a new index every few weeks, there's a natural fluctuation in the number of links we find. There are literally billions and billions of links on the web we have to crawl every month, calculate metrics for each one, and then package them into an index that makes sense.

Sometimes links will disappear or re-appear in the index. This is natural and usually minor, although a large jump or decrease in your Domain Authority can be scary - it doesn't mean your traffic or rankings will change. Mozscape may have trouble finding links on pages without a lot of links pointing to them, or links hidden under layers of navigation. For more, see this document:

http://www.seomoz.org/help/open-s...

3. Finally, it's possible you actually lost a portion of you backlink profile. Are you missing any important links that you are aware of? It's estimated that 80% of the web vanishes every year. If this is the case, you might want to use Google Analytics to find who was sending you traffic over the past couple of years, and verify those links are still around today. If you find links missing, perhaps you can take action, or be proactive in gaining new links.

Hope this information helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[Richard555]

Hi Michael

In short, it could be many reasons. A few things to consider:

Have you checked your Google Webmaster tool for clues?

Have you seen a drop in actual visitor traffic through GA?

Does the drop match the dates of some of the Google updates?

Have your competitor sites had the similar fate?

Are the red and yellow errors in your SEOMoz campaign reports increasing?

Checked Site Explorer for issues?

From of the three things you mention the first one maybe one to check - perhaps you are suggesting some iffy link building had taken place?

I assume you have had a capitilisation issue for ages so that in itself wont have caused a sudden drop.

Its more likely a series of things you need to fix so check back whats happened on the site in the past few months.

Finally, has it effected your bottom line? - sales / leads etc? That is what really matters.

Best of luck

Nigel