Domain Authority and Links drastically decreased in less than a month
-
I'm fairly new to SEO, and am left completely perplexed about why our two SEO client's links and DA decreased so drastically in so little time.
Looking at their stats on Moz, between May and June, their DA's went down by 3-5 (which, they were fairly low to begin with), and external links were halved! This is rather concerning to me as building their external links has been my focus for the past few months for both of them.
There are a number of tweaks that I could make to site structure in terms of meta descriptions and page title length (though I can't fix that as the clients want to keep the titles as is), however there are no critical errors. I have also placed a lot of filters on both of their Google Analytics pages as they were getting what I just now realized was a ton of spam, though I don't see how that would affect anything.
I just can't imagine what lead to all of those external link suddenly dropping. I imagine the drastic drop in those lead to the DA decrease, but again, I'm very new, so I'm not certain.
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. I have been panicking quite a bit since I've seen this!
-
Sure thing, those posts from May were probably after the last release of the index (May 5th). Hopefully you will see your site's DA return to a similar level, or even higher with the next release of the Index (scheduled June 23rd). Here are a few additional threads with more explanation. Nothing to worry about, you're not alone.
http://moz.com/community/q/what-s-the-story-on-mozscape-updates
http://moz.com/community/q/what-causes-total-external-links-to-fluctuate-so-much
http://moz.com/community/q/significant-drop-in-external-followed-links -
Ah, I had read about that change in a similar post from May, and thought it had been resolved. Thank you for the quick response. Will try to turn off the panic now!
-
Other users have experienced similar things with the most recent MozScape index since it was smaller than previous ones. There should be a new update coming in about two weeks, that will be a good opportunity to measure results and compare with previous Indexes. Since your client's sites don't have many links to begin with, even small variations in the index could cause major shifts in the site's DA. Check out this thread below for an explanation, it sounds like you're experiencing a similar situation.
Kyle Eaves
SEO Specialist
KyleEaves.com
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 change from .co.uk to .com - do you add .com to the referral exclusion in GA?
Hi Mozzers, Just wanted to double check that when a website domain changes from .co.uk to .com - do you add .com to the referral exclusion in GA? Do you also keep the .co.uk version in the list too? I have updated the property settings to .com Thanks Anthony
Reporting & Analytics | | Tone_Agency0 -
Cross domain tracking Google Analytics
Hi there, Got a question on cross domain tracking: We have a couple of TLD's to serve localized content to our visitors, next to our main .com TLD where our app is running as well in a subdomain. Situation is this: Local sites:
Reporting & Analytics | | jorisbrabants
marketingsite.be
marketingsite.com.br
marketingsite.fr Main site: marketingsite.com
app.marketingsite.com Conversion gets triggered when somebody ends up in app.marketingsite.com/firstuse for example. People can sign up at the local site filling in their email but they end up in app.marketingsite.com/firstuse Reading this article on cross domain tracking I'm getting a bit confused on the setup of the tracking code itself. The sample code provided shows these two lines: ga('require', 'linker'); ga('linker:autoLink', ['maindomain.com','targetdomain.com']); Now the question 🙂 Is it correct when I think that maindomain should be replaced with our local TLD's on every one of those, and that targetdomain is where the conversion happens? In this case the .com site?0 -
Is It Possible to have Cross Domain Tracking on Two Different Accounts?
Good afternoon to all, I have this kind of dilemma regarding setting up tracking code on two different accounts, namely bioglass.com with GA Code UA-12345678-1 where all the product information has been listed and shopbioglass.com with GA Code UA-87654321-1 where the prices are located and transaction takes place. Both of them are connected since if you click the buy button on bioglass.com for a specific product, it will automatically redirect to shopbioglass.com where the prices and transactions comes into place. Dilemma: I want to check how many conversion took place from bioglass.com to shopbioglass.com. I know they have different GA Code but is it possible for me to have a cross domain tracking for this?? What are the possible remedies if not? Thanks to all 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | TWSOM0 -
How Am I Linked to These Sites?
I was going through Google Analytics, specifically looking at the Channels under Acquisition. I found a number of sites that Google is giving credit as sources of traffic.
Reporting & Analytics | | TowerMarketing
When I went to the sites, however, and searched the page source for links to my site, I could not find any. My site is www.towermarketing.net. The sites being listed by GA are:
blackhawkhardware.com
musicas.baixar-musicas-gratis.com If anyone can tell me how Tower is getting traffic from these sites, and what I can do to fix it - because at this point I am considering them spam - I would appreciate it. Thanks!0 -
Why is my direct traffic down DRASTICALLY?
I have been seeing a trend for a while that is intesifying. My direct traffic numbers are down A LOT. We are not down 50% to LY (in actual number not just percentage of traffic) I am trying to understand what could be the causes of this issue. I was considering simply bigger meaner competition, but I actually perform decently on my returning customers. Also my performance on my brand keyword is more inline with my current trend so I would except these KW to do equally as bad if the actual brand/store was the issue. The more surprising even, is the fact that I can trace back the start of the trend exactly to the day. Overnight on Sept 22 LY direct traffic went down 30% (to LY) when it was trending UP 20-25%(to LY) before. Now, we did do a redesign of the website on May 2011 (4 months before the drop), and did change host Oct 2011 (a couple weeks after the start of the trend). Do you have any clue as to why this could be happening? Did GA start tracking direct traffic differently?
Reporting & Analytics | | CassisGroup
Any thoughts?0 -
My Domain Authority Dropped Dramatically..Can Someone Tell Me Why??
Over the last month or so my Domain Authority, my MozRank and MozTrust have all dropped off considerably. I haven't been doing anything different. So I don't know where to turn or what to do to get it back to where it was. The effects are horrible on my SEO. Can anyone out there tell me what it is I can do to why they dropped? Or more importantly, how can I improve it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Caseman0 -
Does an internal link inside an iframe result in a bounce?
We built a landing page with a wufoo form. Inside the wufoo form is a link going to another page on our website. We are wondering if clicking on that link will result in a bounce since it is in an iframe. We are using google analytics.
Reporting & Analytics | | seozachz0 -
Will having a subdomain cause referral traffic from the domain name?
Hi! One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com. When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com. Is this because of the subdomain issue? How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx0