Website domain authority dropped from 55 to 1 in two months
-
Hi all! Our website DA dropped from 55 to 1 in a matter of two months. Last time I checked, it was two months ago and the website DA was 55. When I checked today, it is 1. Needless to day, I am shocked.
The website has been around since 1995 and has always had pretty decent DA and PA. We made a couple of important changes during past 3-4 months. One is to support HTTPS and another is to implement the responsive web design to support browsing by mobile devices.
What could be the reason for such a dramatic drop of DA in a short period of time? Where would you suggest me to look for it? How can we get the problem fixed?
Here is the website URL: www.infohub.com
Thank you!
-
Thanks Gaston for your comments!
Hey Jim,
First of all, apologies for the wrong timeframe, it was in fact updated on 8th January and the next expected update will be February 26th.
The Mozscape index, which powers Open Site Explorer, is still growing, and while it is large, our index doesn't cover the entire web.
When we collect this data, we’re looking specifically for the most valuable links and, rather than crawling your entire site or every site, we collect this by starting our crawler on a few highest ranking sites and letting it perform a breadth first search to see what it finds.
It is also possible that we found your links again, but that they did not meet our relevancy threshold and were excluded from the index. Because the Index is an automated process, there isn't one single 'technique' you can use to get picked up. The best thing you can do to help your links become re-indexed in OSE is to work on building links from sites with high Mozrank.
We do recommend using a wide variety of backlink tools to get the most illustrative picture of how your site's backlink profile looks, as Gaston mentioned. OSE and Ahrefs index differently and have different purposes. Ahrefs is good for quantity while OSE is great for finding higher quality links.
You can read more about how we build our index in our guide here.
On a positive note we do have plans in the works to improve and broaden out the data we have in the index, keep an eye out!
I hope this helps - let me know if you have any further questions!
Eli
-
Hope someone from Moz will respond. I posted the original thread on Dec 20. I was told to wait until next Moz update - it was said to happen on Jan 15th. I waited and the problem is still there after the update. It is hard to continue to wait without knowing if the problem will be fixed or not. At the same time, the situation we are in is very serious.
Jim
-
My suggestion is to wait a little longer.
Its possible that Moz's staff can't help you directly, because they dont manage the websites that are crawled in every update. At least that is what i know.Best luck.
GR. -
Hi Gaston,
You are right that we don't see any correlation between our website DA and website traffic. After our website DA dropped from 50's to 1, the website traffic has remained unchanged.
HOWEVER, as I mentioned in my previous post, we work with many writers (mostly bloggers) on content development. Most bloggers will check a site's domain authority before they agree to write for the site because they will ask for a back link to their own website from article's author bio section. When a site's DA is 1, it is very difficult (almost impossible) to find blogger to work with us. Hope you now understand the situation we are in. I hope someone from Moz will respond and help get this issue resolved soon.
Jim
-
Hi!
Remember, that lowering in Moz's metrics doesn't mean that you will lose rankings.
Also, you can check here: https://moz.com/products/api/updates the current mozscape index. The actual was updated on January 8, 2018.I'd sauggest you to be patient and back your metrics with oter tools too, like SEMrush, Majestic and/or ahrefs.
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR -
Hi Eli,
The next update to our index is January 15th 2018.
Today is January 16th. I have just checked our site DA and it is still 1. Any suggestion on how we can get our site DA and PA back? We work with outside writers on content development and the writers usually check a site's DA before agreeing working for us. So when our site's DA drops to 1, it puts us in a major dilemma. So we would like to this issue resolved as soon as possible. Thank you.
-
Hi Jim,
Forgot to mention the bad news on regard a migration to https, due to Google considers the https a new website, it will crawl all as "a new website".
That is great at first, though any failure from old times will appear with "red flags" because the 2017 algorithms will work. I mean broken links, 404s and so, that you didn´t know those were there, will be shown up.That is why it is highly advisable to perform an SEO audit and fix up all, before the migration.
Although, in many years of SEO practice, only one client came before the migration.Hope you recover your website's great DA soon
-
Hi Jim,
Did you upload a "disavow all" file?
No
GreatDid you add the new property - https - to the Google Search Console?
how to add https to Google Search Console? Should we do it or not?Yes you ought to!
You have to add all versions of the website (if you did not add the http versions in the past to Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmasters).Where?:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/How to do it?:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6332964?What properties?:
http://infohub.com/
https:/infohub.com/
http://www.infohub.com/
https://www.infohub.com/After all those were done:
Into this property only: https://www.infohub.com/
veryfy the robot texts
upload a site map
fetch as google
You will see data starts to be shown and index within a few days.Did you inadverted deleted the Google Analytics code?
Don't think so. We still see site traffic stats in our GA account. That means the GA code is in place, right?
Yes.Good luck!
Mª Verónica
-
Hi Veronica,
Did you upload a "disavow all" file?
NoDid you add the new property - https - to the Google Search Console?
how to add https to Google Search Console? Should we do it or not?Did you inadverted deleted the Google Analytics code?
Don't think so. We still see site traffic stats in our GA account. That means the GA code is in place, right?Jim
-
Hi Jim,
Besides Gaston and Eli's responses, I truly think that is weird.
I mean that you have not a single inbound link after 22 years!
Did you upload a "disavow all" file?
Did you add the new property - https - to the Google Search Console?
Did you inadverted deleted the Google Analytics code?
Good luck!
Mª Verónica -
In addition to Gaston's answer
In the case of a URL switch, especially an HTTP to an HTTPS, remember that it is normal to see a bit of a drop in some of your stats just after the move.
We have a blog post about migrating to HTTPS: https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl
There are also some great Q&A threads about the potential impact:
https://moz.com/community/q/our-homepage-url-has-been-301-d-to-the-new-https-version-as-our-md-wanted-us-to-have-the-secure-protocol
https://moz.com/community/q/will-switching-to-https-lower-my-domain-authorityThe next update to our index is January 15th 2018.
Let me know if you have any other questions,
Eli
-
Hi there!
Dont worry, there is nothing wrong with your site.
Wait a month or two, you might be crawled again and the PA/DA will be back.
The thing here is the Mozscape index, in where that site might have not been crawled for the last 6 month (Moz's index only stores data for 180 days).
I do highly recommend to use other backlink checker tools, such as Ahrefs.com or Majestic.com. Also in search console there is a part where Google tells you some of the backlinks pointing to your site.I'll be attaching an image from ahrefs to show you that backlinks are there and are crawable.
Keep in mind that DA/PA or any other metric outthere does not tell the quality of any site. its just an approximation of what that tool understands about google algorithms.
More info here:
Mozscape API updates
Open Site Explorer Guide - Moz Help hubHope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.
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
-
Unsolved Next scheduled Domain Authority Update?
Hello, can someone with API access please check it for me? I am told it is available here: http://moz.com/products/api/updates Thank you
API | | archimede910 -
My DA dropped suddenly
Hi Everyone! DA of my site dropped from 7 to 1. I don't know what is the reason behind it? Can you tell me what is the main reason of dropping down?
API | | lucas77861 -
Navigation pages with a PA 1
Ok, you guys probably think this is a new website and i should just wait, but this is not the case.
API | | Forresult
We have 2 websites (old) websites with a DA of 34 and a DA of 19 and high PA values on the mainpage. Our problem: All the other pages stay at a page authority of 1. One website is build in Magento and one in Wordpress. Both websites have deeplinks, footerlinks en in-contentlinks. The other pages don't get any linkjuice according to Moz. We don't use any robot noindex,nofollow or nofollow links and the menu structure isn't the problem. Is anyone familiare with the problem? I know is shouldn't be concerned about PA/DA, but i just can't explain what's going on.0 -
Frequency of Moz page authority updates?
I have some new pages on my site, and Moz gives them a very low PA ranking. I am wondering if these scores are updated monthly or quarterly? I'm not sure how frequently to check back for updated scoring.
API | | AndrewMicek0 -
Why did my Domain Authority drop all the way to 1
The Domain Authority on my sites has dropped all the way down to 1. This seems to have happened recently, although i'm not sure when or what the ranking used to be. Could this have anything to do with the "catastrophic failure of the hard disk" on 1/8/2016? https://community.uservoice.com
API | | itsbrad
https://www.uservoice.com0 -
Two days since the supposed update
And still no update. Less a question, more a comment. Feeling a bit of deja vu here.
API | | pfrance3 -
August 3rd Mozscape Index Update (our largest index, but nearly a monthly late)
Update 5:27pm 8/4 - the data in Open Site Explorer is up-to-date, as is the API and Mozbar. Moz Analytics campaigns are currently loading in the new data, and all campaigns should be fully up-to-date by 4-10pm tomorrow (8/5). However, your campaign may have the new data much earlier as it depends on where that campaign falls in the update ordering. Hey gang, I wanted to provide some transparency into the latest index update, as well as give some information about our plans going forward with future indices. The Good News: This index, now that it's delivered, is pretty impressive. Mozscape's August index is 407 Billion URLs in size, nearly 100 Billion (~25%) bigger than our last record index size. We indexed 2.18 trillion links for the first time ever (prior record was 1.54 trillion). Correlations for Page Authority have gone up from 0.319 to 0.333 in the latest index, suggesting that we're getting a slightly more accurate representation of Google's use of links in rankings from this data (DA correlations remain constant at 0.185) Our hit ratio for URLs in Google's SERPs has gone up considerably, from 69.97% in our previous index to 78.66% in the August update. This indicates we are crawling and indexing more of what Google shows in the search results (a good benchmark for us). Note that a large portion of what's missing will be things published in the last 30-60 days while we were processing the index (after crawling had stopped). The Bad News: August's index was late by ~25 days. We know that reliable, consistent, on-time Mozscape updates are critically important to everyone who uses Moz's products. We've been working hard for years to get these to a better place, but have struggled mightily. Our latest string of failures was completely new to the team - a bunch of problems and issues we've never seen before (some due to the index size, but many due to odd things like a massive group of what appear to be spam domains using the Palau TLD extension clogging up crawl/processing, large chunks of pages we crawled with 10s of thousands of links which slow down the MozRank calculations, etc). While there's no excuse for delays, and we don't want to pass these off as such, we do want to be transparent about why we were so late. Our future plans include scaling back the index sizes a bit, dealing with the issues around spam domains, large link-list pages, some of the odd patterns we see in .pl and .cn domains, and taking one extra person from the Big Data team off of work on the new index system (which will be much larger and real-time rather than updated every 30 days) to help with Mozscape indices. We believe these efforts, and the new monitoring systems we've got will help us get better at producing high quality, consistent indices. Question everyone always asks: Why did my PA/DA change?! There are tons of reasons why these can change, and they don't necessarily mean anything bad about your site, your SEO efforts, or whether your links are helping you rank. PA and DA are predictive, correlated metrics that say nothing about how you're actually performing. They merely map better than most metrics to Google's global rankings across large SERP sets (but not necessarily your SERPs, which is what you should care about). That said, here's some of the reasons PA/DA do shift: The domains/pages with the highest PA/DA scores gain even faster than most of the domains below them, making it harder each index to get higher scores (since PA/DA are on a logarithmic scale, this is smoothed out somewhat - it would be much worse on a conventional scale, e.g. Facebook.com 100, everyone else 0.0003). Google's ranking algorithm introduces new elements, changes, modifies what they care about, etc. Moz crawls a set of the web that does or doesn't include the pages that are more likely to point to a given domain than another. Although our crawl tends to be representative, if you've got lots of links from deep pages on less popular domains in a part of the web far from the mainstream, we may not consistently crawl those well (or, we could overcrawl your sector because it recently received powerful links from the center of the web). My advice, as always, is to use PA/DA as relative scores. If your scores are falling, but your competitors' are falling more, that's not a bad thing. If your scores are rising, but your competitors' are rising faster, they're probably gaining ground on you. And, if you're talking about score changes in the 1-4 points range, that's not necessarily anything but noise. PA/DA scores often shift 1-4 points up or down in a new index so don't sweat it! Let me know if you've got more questions and I'll do my best to answer. You can also refer to the API update page here: https://moz.com/products/api/updates
API | | randfish8 -
Moz crawl error? DA & Linking domains significant drop.
Hi guys! Our site www.carwow.co.uk appears to have been punched in the face by the latest Moz update. It's claiming our #linking root domains has dropped from 225 to 135 and has subsequently hit our DA from 38 to 35. We haven't disavowed any links and our off-site strategy has been going well the past 2 months. Search performance has increased by around 15% (around 5k sessions) and rankings have improved week on week. Any idea if this is a Moz error? That's almost a 50% drop in linking root domains. Thanks, James
API | | Matt.Carwow0