Flauctuating number of Internal Equity-Passing Links affecting DA

[TMI]

My site has a high number of  fluctuating internal equity passing links in open site explorer from month to month, theses range from 30 000 and sometimes as high as 1,million. The fluctuations occur even when I have made no changes onsite. I have noticed that when the internal equity passing links are very high the DA drops and when they are low the DA is high, has anyone ever experienced this with open site explorer ?

[TMI]

Thanks for the response. It does make sense but I will also send the site in question just to make sure you can the best idea of what I mean. Thanks

[samantha.chapman]

Hi there,

Sam from Moz's Help Team here!

It's hard to pinpoint what could be happening here without a specific example/side by side comparison, but there could be a variety of things coming into play in terms of why you're seeing such dramatic fluctuations. One of these could be that in Open Site Explorer, you might be alternating between looking at the results for 'this page'/'this subdomain'/'this root domain' - all of which could present wildly different results. It's also completely normal to see fluctuations in DA and the number of links because sample sizes and sources fluctuate in each index update. Rand actually wrote a really great summation of the reasons for DA drops here, but I'll summarise below for you:

1.You've earned relatively more or less links over the course of the last 30-90 days.
2. You've earned more links, but the highest authority sites have grown their link profile even more.
3. The links you've earned are from places that we haven't seen correlate well with higher Google rankings.
4. We've done a better or worse job crawling sites/pages that have links to you (or don't).

We collect our link index data by starting our crawler on a few highest ranking sites and letting it perform a breadth first search to see what it finds. For each page that we crawl, we first collect each of it’s links before following these and collecting the details of each page that these link to and so on. There’s a set limit of links that we’ll crawl per page and pages that we’ll crawl per site so it’s expected that we may not follow every link on your site this way and the results may change from index to index. Other things could affect our ability to find certain links within your site from index to index, such as 404/server errors etc - any potential problem within your site at the time we crawled it that prevented us from finding the links we otherwise would have.

I hope this helps - if you have any other questions, feel free to pop a message over to help@moz.com with a specific website example and we can dive in and see what we can figure out:).