Domain Authority? Why is it declining according to Moz?
-
So I know what good SEO is, I am performing very well for this client but for some reason Moz Pro is saying their domain authority is declining with each index? Anything I can look into specifically to stop this from happening?
-
Thanks everyone, every bit of info was very much appreciated!
-
I agree with everyone here (thanks, guys!), and I want to add that DA and PA are both most useful when benchmarking against competitors, not as an absolute value.
Take this scenario—a high-authority industry site links to a large number of other sites in the same industry, and they all benefit from its authority. But if for whatever reason that site goes down or loses authority, all sites it links to could be affected. That could conceivably bring down the DA of a major portion of the vertical.
None of those sites did anything wrong, and since they're each others' main SERP competitors, their rankings may not change at all. But they'll now all have lower DA.
Does that help at all?
-
I think you may also need to look into what Rand said here: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here
According to Rand, Moz is indexing a bit of different stuff lately. This means that DA & PA will change depending on the link comp of your site.
I would start there - and not worry much about it. PA & DA are guides but don't determine your rankings.
-
In addition to the good things said by others
check your backlink profile versus your competitors, probably they are getting more backlinks or more authoritative ones, or maybe your old backlinks are poor quality and dropping in value,
check your backlink profile for anchor diversity and cross check with your competitors
are you having traffic drops? Maybe not overall, but hidden in some traffic segments? are those drops linked to a dropping ranking for some keywords? If so why? Increasing competition? Due to some backlink related issues? See above.
is your content quality dropping compared to your competitors? are you serving pages with thin content and your competitors are offering better content? Less duplicate? More targeted?
i could go on, but this is at least where I would start my homework
-
You may want to rely on more then just one site's DA metric to make your actual assessment. Moz's number while helpful is just a very educated guess; which can not take into account all the factors. What is most important is conversion rates, sales, or keyword rankings depending on what your goal is.
It is not uncommon for our DA to go up or down a few points month to month. This usually has a correlation to how many linking domains and the like the crawl comes back with. Not ever site will get scanned every crawl, so this number doesn't play a huge role in how successful I view my efforts.
Hope that helps,
Don
-
Because domain authority is capped at 100, it has to be a comparison of how the assets of your website compare to the assets of every other website out there.
To increase your domain authority, you must increase the assets of your site faster in comparison to all of the other sites on the web. So, a person could be working to improve their website and actually make progress, but domain authority could drop because other websites are doing more.
Rankings operate the same way. If you improve your website, but your competitor improves his more, then you will not advance to a position above him, even though you might have done a ton of work.
This is a very simplified explanation.
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
-
Domain name in URL
Hi we are targeting local cities across the UK with landing pages for our website. We have built up a few links for https://www.caffeienmarketing.co.uk/bristol/ and recently advised that I should change the URL to https://www.caffeienmarketing.co.uk/marketing-agency-bristol/ and 301 directing the old one 2 questions really: 1. is there any benefit in doing this these days in that this is the main keyword target we have for this page? 2. Do I get 100% benefit for all the links built up on the old page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Migration to a new domain
Hi everyone, So i have one project where I'm planning to move current content on new domain, two reasons: 1. It seems current domain has some google penalty (backlink related, not manual) 2. Client wants rebranding and already has domain with new brand name. So as content is high quality and there is no content related penalty from google, what would be the best way to migrate existing content without passing any penalty AND without Google treating it as duplicate content. If i do 301 i suspect any penalty there is might follow, if i just copy existing content it won't be original content, what is the best solution here? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joelsemy0 -
Geo-target .ag domain?
Hi Guys, We are looking to purchase a .ag domain for a agriculture website, we want to target two countries Australia (primary) and United States. So the main site e.g. www.farming.ag (will target Australia) While the www.farming.ag/us/ sub-folder will target the United States From my understanding through after reading this: https://www.name.com/domains/ag .ag is for countries Antigua and Barbuda. So i was wondering can you even geo-target to Aus or even the sub-folder to United States in search console? Any advice would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito1 -
Domain Migration of high traffic site:
We plan to perform a domain migration in 6 months time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I read the different articles on moz relating to domain migration, but some doubts remain: Moving some linkworthy content upfront to new domain was generally recommended. I have such content (free e-learning) that I could move already now to new domain.
Should I move it now or just 2 months before migration?
Should I be concerned whether this content and early links could indicate to google a different topical theme of the new domain ? E.g. in our case free elearning app vs a commercial booking of presential courses of my core site which is somehow but not extremely strongly related) and links for elearning app may be very specific from appstores and from sites about mobile apps. we still have some annoying .php3 file extensions in many of our highest traffic pages and I would like to drop the file-extension (no further URL change). It was generally recommended to minimize other changes at the same time of domain migration, but on the other hand implementing later another 301 again may also not be optimum and it would save time to do it all at the same time. Shall I do the removal of the file extension at the same time of the domain migration or rather schedule it for 3 months later? On the same topic, would the domain migration be a good occasion to move to https instead of http at the same time, or also should we rather do this at a different time? Any thoughts or suggestions?0 -
Experience of moving to a new domain
Hi all just wondering if anyone has ever had any experience / tips / advice. moving from domain name a to b is well published all over the web and the practice is often discussed on here. but my question is has anyone ever done moving the domain from a to b and then after x time move back to domain a. i can't find any examples, notes anywhere on Google. thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Sub Domain
Hi everybody, My competition has started to use the sub-domains vastly. He has created one sub domain for every single city and keyword. Is it something that I should be worried of? Is it a good idea I start doing the same thing? Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Armin6660 -
Are sites that leave out www from domain at a disadvantage to domains with www in url
I know this has been discussed but was wondering what would be the best approach from an SEO perspective. I quite like the idea of setting up websites with domains without www but always worry that setting up domains without www has a disadvantage because user are use to referring to sites with the www included. Thus one of my fears are that users would link back using www version which will mean even if you do a 301 redirect that some of the link juice would be lost. I know some famous sites have used this convention such as http://searchenginewatch.com/ so think it would be possible but still concerned that for new sites it would be better to rather stick to conventions. What are your opinions about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SABest0