Seeing steady drop in Domain Authority?
-
Hi!
I'm working with a client that has seen a steady drop in their domain authority over the past year and a half. They were at 75 in October '13 and now they're down to 67. The drop seems rather steady over this time, no big dip.
They've actually worked their crawl errors during this time and have reduced a ton of them. I can't figure out why this metric would be dropping. Anyone know of something measurable I can look at to help pinpoint the problem (and of course actions to fix it)?
Thanks so much!
Becky -
Hello Becky, Yes it could be interpreted as their gaining links and your not. But it could also be interpreted as the sites their backlinks are on are gaining links, and the sites your backlinks are on are losing links.
If your backlink is on my site and my site's DA goes up by 30 points, then your site's DA will also go up by a certain number of points. Your DA increase would be dependent on where your backlink is on my site. If your backlink was on my homepage, then I'd say your DA would probably go up by about 4 points.
And yes Becky, the only way to increase DA is via inbound links. But I would also try to move my clients focus away from this metric as it's not that relevant to traffic or rankings. In many niches, I see sites with lower DA dominating the rankings and getting more traffic.
-
Thanks Andy and Richard!
That all makes sense and is helpful to think about the 100 cap.
Their competition actually has gone down a little bit over that time, but only a point or two vs. our larger drop. Could that be interpreted as they're gaining links and we are not?
Tactics for improving this number are all focused on link building?
Thanks!
Becky
-
As DA has a limit of 100, drops aren't always a bad indication and should really be compared against competition. Lets say the competition has dropped from 76 to 61, then in theory you have gained by 7.
Richard is also correct, but you can only really measure DA in comparison as their is a ceiling of 100 - so you can't always keep on improving.
I would start to the DA against the competitors and report that way - rather than just showing how they have dropped.
-
Hi Becky, The domain authority is dropping because the site is either losing inbound links or the sites linking to your site are losing their domain authority. Crawl errors will have nothing to do with the issue because Moz is crawling the sites that link to you to calculate your DA.
If you run the site through ahrefs I'm sure you'll see a gradual decline in your site's overall inbound links.
Remember there are two types of Domain Authority (DA). There is good DA and bad DA. The Moz DA algorithm has difficulty defining the wheat from the chaff. Spammy links can contribute to your DA. In a recent test, I was able to take a brand new domain name to a DA72 in less than 50 days. But that domain is now useless, and it's DA of 72, and Page Authority of 68 aren't true representations of the quality of that domain.
There could be many scenarios where your DA goes down, but your rankings go up. This could occur if you were removing all of your bad links manually. Your DA would go down, but your ranking might actually go up in some scenarios.
High DA only correlates to high rankings when the link profile contributing to the high DA is clean, (well most of the time). There could also be crawl errors on the sites linking back to you, and this would cause a drop in your site's DA too. The only way to raise your site's DA is with new links. If your site naturally gains links over time, then your DA will remain stable and possibly continue to grow. If there's no influx of new links, then chances are that you'll naturally lose some of the old links you've previously had causing your DA to drop gradually.
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
-
Has anyone else experience their Domain Authority Drop in the last 2 weeks to their sites
Has anyone else experienced their Domain Authority Score Drop in the last 2 weeks. I have 6 sites and all of their DA dropped between 2-4 points. At the beginning I thought it was just my Wordpress sites, but it happened to all my sites. If anyone has any answers, please enlighten me. Is it Google? Last time this happened was in March 2013 and raised all the scores back up and now as of lately, they all have dropped. Kin Regards, David
Moz Pro | | ACann1 -
Domain Authority Droped 4 Points
Hi there, After the Last Mozscape index update: 08/27/2013Our DA along with all our competitors DA has dropped 4 points, Is there any reason for this ?Have others seen the same thing? Any suggestions of building DA again fast ? The owner of the company gets the reports from Moz and it really doesn't look good. Is it expected to bounce back ?
Moz Pro | | 365ToursSafaris
We we started our SEO efforts the DA was at 28 ... then after a few developments it went up to 34 then dropped to 30 for no apprent reason, and now its down to 26 .. How do we stop this downhill slide ? DA_Drop.jpg0 -
Can I see when SEO Moz has crawled my website?
I would like to know if it's possible to see (maybe in my Google Analytics) if SEO Moz has crawled my website. I'm also curious if and where I can see when the robot of Google visited my website. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Spotler0 -
Root domain www subdomain only
Is there a way to set up a campaign to track the root domain and www subdomain only? Or to exclude certain subdomains from a campaign?
Moz Pro | | zingiri0 -
List sub-domains for a root domain.
Is there an easy way to find out all the sub domains registered for a given root domain. Our site (ea.com) has literally hundreds registered sub domains. I need to track down the ones that are public. It would be nice to get a list of public sub domains, along with some link metrics on each. Maybe this could be a new linkscape feature. Thanks, David Fricks
Moz Pro | | davidfricks0 -
The value of .uk.com domains
It was a long night last night (working, not playing), therefore forgive the potential stupidness of this question... Running an OSE report on a website earlier their top linking domain was *.uk.com. This is a valid TLD, and I know for sure that the website has not acquired links direct from the uk.com website but from some-other-registered-domain.uk.com. What I am asking is does the Moz Calculation and/or the pagerank calculation give more value to these links? *.uk.com has a Domain Authority of 71 and 156,497 linking root domains. If so i'm gonna go buy me a bunch of .uk.com domains..... Opinions please.
Moz Pro | | eseyo2 -
A tool for seeing all the keywords a website ranks for
As title, is there a tool out there that will allow you to see all the keywords a website ranks for in the first few pages of a particlur search engine? I would be particularly interested for keywords in the first 10 pages of Google. Thanks
Moz Pro | | blagger0 -
Incorrect domain authority result on SEO tool bar and OSE
The SEO tool bar is returning what I believe to be an incorrect domain authority of 71 and showing 24,356,141 lins from 153,051 domains. The OSE is also returning 71 as domain authority. Anyone know what could be doing this? Thanks. Jason
Moz Pro | | jayderby0