Domain authority decrease after open site explorer update. Reasons?

[inmonova]

Hi!

I just noticed a decrease on our domain authority and also the page authority of several of our pages on the SeoMoz toolbar. For instance, DA went from 34 to 29. I was scared and confused, so I went to check it on the opensite explorer and saw that it had been updated.

I want to ask you guys if the same happened with your metrics or is it just us. Because the strange thing about it is that we have been doing some good optimization work lately and also some linkbuilding, and actually our SERP’s have been improving in general, and some specific ones have been performing great.

Our website is http://www.inmonova.com as a reference.

Can anyone cast some light into this?

[carinoverturf]

Hey guys!

Keri is right - we have done some updating with our crawler and this index represents the newest version - unfortunately with a few hiccups. People seem to be seeing two issues with this new index - link counts and domain authorities are going up or down considerably and there is an increase of "questionable" inbound links.

Both issues are due to the same root cause: our new crawler is built to be fresher, but it is going deeper into domains, and, unfortunately not visiting as many domains. Domains with a high MozRank are getting crawled deeper, but domains with middle to lower MozRanks are not getting crawled.

Our top priority now is to get the domain diversity back up to or better than that of our last update as was originally designed. It's fixable and we will be focusing all efforts on this.

Previous crawling worked by selecting a list of the top MozRank URLs (around 10B) and then crawling one page from each of them. Now we are crawling links as we discover them, and crawling high MozRank sites daily, weekly or monthly. The advantage of the new crawlers is we are crawling all the time and so we will have fresher data. As links are added, we are much more likely to discover these deeper links. The new crawl had 59B urls, a lot more than the previous 42B, however, more of these links are from the same domain.

The reason for the "questionable" links is due to the fact that the crawler is reaching deeper into the domains where there are more download links. We are currently looking into fixing this so these won't be counted as links. We'll let you know as soon as that issue is resolved!

We are really sorry for the inconvenience. Once we have this new crawler dialed it will provide much fresher and higher quality data!!

Thanks,

Carin

[inmonova]

Hey! Thanks a lot. I was a bit worried because the timing was just not very lucky for us.

There had been almost no SEO work, at leas no linkbuilding, for 2 years and we only started 2 months ago, so causality was making me wonder if we had been doing something wrong.

Your answers make me feel better. And yes, it's true that competitors have also gone through changes. Some have improved though (grrrrrrr.....).

Looking forward to the engineer's explanations!

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! Don't panic! This is part of the OSE algorithm update. The OSE engineers will be over here in the next few days to give some more explanation here, but wanted to let you know now that it isn't your website that had a big change.

[dunklea]

We noticed the same decrease on three of our websites as well, and some of the competitors we track. One of our websites also went dramatically up (with many new questionable links). I believe this latest update of the link graph had some major changes that altered the domain authorities on a lot of websites. These numbers are all relative to everyone else, so hopefully this isn't an accurate reflection of how our websites are performing.

Good luck! Happy optimizing

Andrew