Site has DA of 26 but no backlinks

[ThomasHarvey]

I'm asking this for a guy over at SEOchat: http://forums.seochat.com/new-user-seo-questions-answers-123/unusual-change-domain-authority-486962.html

Here's what his post says:

Exclamation Unusual Change in Domain authority
Guys and Girls,

I'm having a weird issue in one of my sites , thing is the site had DA 11 in July and however when check on September Site is having 26 without me doing any type of link building and there are no new posts for this month as well. When checked using open site explorer there are no backlinks indexed in their Mozcape index as well.

Site: http://www.beijingtravelchannel.com/

Can you give me any plausible reasons for this to happen, so that i can check them out.

Thanks in Advance.

[ThomasHarvey]

I just posted this for a user on a forum I am a moderator on so unfortunately I can't answer that question.

This was his reply to your post:

"Hi, Thomas I think the lady who replied last to your thread in Moz had hit the spot. backlink from Washington post must have bump up the DA ( Even though the change is too high ). I wonder why this link didn't show up in web master tools. Google mustn't have indexed this link thus far. and Moz not showing the link is also a question. "

[DonnaDuncan]

I see everyone's responses and understand that DA is based on a variety of factors, but I also agree that a domain authority of 26 seems unusually high for this site.

Majestic reports a Trust Flow of 0 and Citation Flow of 31 and 35 incoming links from 8 different sources, both of which would lend me to expect a lower domain authority for this site. That said, a couple of the recently discovered incoming links are coming from powerful sources, most notably:

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-us-publishers-owe-china/2015/05/26/0b100ff8-02fd-11e5-bc72-f3e16bf50bb6_story.html?utm_term=.1ad4d52de865; and
• http://blog.livedoor.jp/takemiya31/archives/51761738.html

It's possible Moz found these links and just isn't displaying them in Open Site Explorer.

It's not unusual to see dramatic fluctuations in DA when a site has few incoming links. If it was me, I'd wait to see what the next API update reports before concluding real progress has been made. Did you bump up the volume of content on the site recently?

[tawnycase]

To determine Domain Authority, we employ machine learning against Google's algorithm to best model how search engine results are generated. Over 40 signals are included in this calculation. It's possible that the other factors that contribute to Domain Authority are helping to carry the score a bit higher than it otherwise would be. A solid backlink profile is one of the best ways to work on improving a DA score, but it's not the only way.

It's also possible that we previously found and indexed backlinks pointing to this domain, but those backlinks have since fallen out of our Mozscape Index. The links themselves would likely still be in place, but unless our tools were prompted to re-crawl the area of the web where they first found the links, they could very well no longer be included in the current data set and aren't currently displaying if you look at this domain in Open Site Explorer.

You can read more about Domain Authority over here, if this is helpful to you: https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

[ThomasHarvey]

Everything I can see is all link based though. So this is a link metric correct?

If so, how does a site have a DA of 26 but no link profile.

[tawnycase]

Hi there! Tawny from Moz's Customer Support team here.

Domain Authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. It is made up of an aggregate of metrics (MozRank, MozTrust, general link profile, and more) that each have an impact on this score. it can be difficult to directly influence your DA, but one way to move toward increasing it would be to improve your overall SEO. A great place to start with that could be to focus on link building! You can learn more about link building here and get a more detailed explanation of Domain Authority through this resource.

In general, I'd recommend keeping in mind that all of these metrics are relative with respect to the other sites included in our index. The metrics will probably have some additional context when compared to sites similar to your own, including your competitors.

Rand does a great job of breaking down how to interpret DA fluctuations through this post. Give it a once over to see if it helps clarify some of your questions! I hope this helps!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I am sure I have read that it isn't just links, but quite happy for MOZ to put this right.

What makes me thing it isn't just links, is this:

The best way to influence this metric is to improve your overall SEO. In particular, you should focus on your link profile—which influences MozRank and MozTrust

So it says to focus on your link profile, but improve your overall SEO - I would assume from this that it is more heavily biased towards links, but that isn't the end of it.

-Andy

[ThomasHarvey]

Hi Andy,

I see this:

"We calculate this metric by combining all of our other link metrics—linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc.—into a single score."

Which leads me to believe that it is a link based metric.

Tom

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Thomas,

DA isn't just calculated off links, so it could be a wide range of factors making this happen. Moz explain it here:

Domain Authority is Moz's calculated metric for how well a given domain is likely to rank in Google's search results. It is based off data from the Mozscape web index and includes link counts, MozRank and MozTrust scores, and dozens of other factors. It uses a machine learning model to predictively find an algorithm that best correlates with rankings across thousands of search results that we predict against.

I hope this helps

-Andy