Why is my domain authority (and page authority) plummeting?
-
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!
-
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!
-
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
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
-
3 Subdomains - Can their authority or ranking affect each other?
HI, We have 3 different subdomains that target completely different industries.
Algorithm Updates | | danialniazi
a.example.com - school reviews
b.example.com - healthcare reviews
c.example.com - car reviews Q1: If any of the above subdomains gets demoted or penalized by Google would that affect the other subdomains? Q2: Moving forward with all the new changes in SEO, penalties, etc; would it be wise to utilize 3 subdomains for different industries or should we consider getting separate domains?0 -
Does Google use data from Gmail to penalize domains and vice versa?
Has anyone noticed issues with Gmail deliverability and spam inboxing happening around the same time as other large Google updates? For example, if Google blasted your site in Panda or Penguin, have anyone seen them use the same judgement across into Gmail deliverability to blacklist your domain?
Algorithm Updates | | Eric_edvisors0 -
Is it wise to conduct a link building campaign to a Google+ Local page?
Is it wise, while doing a link building campaign to not only focus on the main website target page, but also the Google+ Local page? Here are two strategies I was thinking of using: 1. Conduct a city specific link building campaign to direct traffic to the location specific page on the main website AND the Google+ Local page. 2. Use the main website to direct traffic to each cities specific Google+ Local page. Does it make sense to drive links to a Google+ Local page? It does to me, but I haven't seen anything written about that yet... or perhaps I've just missed it along the way. I'd love to hear the communities thoughts. Thanks! Doug
Algorithm Updates | | DougHoltOnline0 -
Domain Deindexed because of Redirect
I think this is an interesting topic to discuss though I'm looking for answers too. One of my well performing domain deindexed by Google today. Reason: Redirect from a 9 year old Deindexed domain (Must be penalysed) I believe this is done by one of my competitor. What you people suggest me to do now? Don't you think if this is the way Google treat the redirects after Penguin anybody can use this technique to harm their competitors?
Algorithm Updates | | HeIsHere0 -
Re-direct domain ranking higher than main domain 6 months later
Hello, I have a question regarding a couple of our in-house domains & rankings. We have our main site which we've had for 3+ years, moderately optimised. And our separate site for another publication, this was it's own stand-alone site but now that site has been removed off our servers & the old domain a straight forward http re-direct via 1&1 to the main website. The old site was removed & forward set up before October 2011, however when searching Google for 'specification online' the old domain appears position #1. We have many other domains which are http re-directs with 1&1 and none of these have causes us this issue. What else can I do to get the old domain to stop showing up on Google? Domains in questions: Main site: http://specificationonline.co.uk Old site: http://housingspecification.com If you need any further info I'll be happy to provide as we owned both domains & hosting from day 1 so can access anything required.
Algorithm Updates | | thestudio40 -
Does Google do domain level topic modeling? If so, are off-site factors such as search traffic volume taken into account?
80% of my site's organic traffic is coming through a resource that is only somewhat related. Does Google think the main topic of my site is terms this resource targets thus bumping the terms I care about to a sub-topic level of sorts? If this is the case, would putting the resource information into a sub-domain help to solve the problem?
Algorithm Updates | | tatermarketing0 -
Google removing pages from Index for Panda effected sites?
We have several clients that we took over from other SEO firms in the last 6 months. We are seeing an odd trend. Links are disappearing from the reports. Not just the SEOmoz reports, but all the back link reports we use. Also... sites that pre Panda would show up as a citation or link, have not been showing up. Many are these are not Indexed, and are on large common Y.P or other type sites. Any one think Google is removing pages from the Index on sites based on Panda. Yours in all curiosity. PS ( we are not large enough to produce quantity data on this.)
Algorithm Updates | | MBayes0 -
Today all of our internal pages all but completely disappeared from google search results. Many of them, which had been optimized for specific keywords, had high rankings. Did google change something?
We had optimized internal pages, targeting specific geographic markets. The pages used the keywords in the url title, the h1 tag, and within the content. They scored well using the SEOmoz tool and were increasing in rank every week. Then all of a sudden today, they disappeared. We had added a few links from textlink.com to test them out, but that's about the only change we made. The pages had a dynamic url, "?page=" that we were about to redirect to a static url but hadn't done it yet. The static url was redirecting to the dynamic url. Does anyone have any idea what happened? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | h3counsel0