Drop in DA across multiple sites

[mr.ankit.manocha]

Hi

I monitor and track few Top sites that are Industry leaders. I got -1 to -3 in DA across this month. Has anyone else experienced this and the matter of fact is there has been rare or no change in the sites but the moz backlink data experienced a major drop "more then 100K backlinks were dropped for them in yesterday's report as compared to a 20 day old report".

Has anyone at Moz or anyone in the community experienced the same

[eli.myers]

I'm sorry about this!

Generally, we recommend using a wide variety of backlink tools to get the most illustrative picture of how your site's backlink profile looks. OSE and Ahrefs index differently and have different purposes. Ahrefs is good for quantity while OSE is great for finding higher quality links. You could always try Ahrefs to compare and potentially give your client the peace of mind that the links are still there.

Domain Authority is our own proprietary metric that is closely correlated to Google rankings, so our customers often use OSE to research influential sites to build links. (E.g. which links to try and target)

[LKyzar]

Thanks Eli for your quick response. This particular case is extreme and sudden - I'm trying to figure out the next step for my client. Everything else is going well with our SEO results - it's just DA and Moz not recognizing their backlinks in Feb - which dropped by 5K with the current index.

[brooksmanley]

I also saw a drop in many of my client's DA with the most recent indexing, but I would agree with Eli – I work with small businesses, and so few of their links are of high quality, meaning it's likely Moz's index will be leaving them out.

[eli.myers]

Hey Linda,

Unfortunately it's impossible for me to predict whether they will be in our next index as I'm sure there were multiple factors that came into play when we released our latest index.

Check out this link which may be helpful: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

Sorry I can't be of anymore help!

Eli

[LKyzar]

Same problem. I had a client DA drop from 40 in January to 29 in Feb. Holy cow!

Looks like Moz did not recognize backlinks with 301 redirects that were previously recognized. Any thoughts on why these redirects were not included in the latest index? And - will this be reversed with the next index?

(redirects, in this case, were due to a new domain that was in place in mid-2017 - backlinks from the old domain had been included until this month).

[eli.myers]

Hey!

Thanks for reaching out to us!

Experiencing a lower Domain Authority drop like this is really nothing to worry about and is due to the fact that on the 5th February we released our latest index. Over the last few months, our index size has been fluctuating in size, and we simply may not have index certain websites / pages which are linking to your site, hence the fact that your DA reduced slightly.

Since Moz focuses on quality of links over quantity, we are always focused on the most relevant links to display to our users. It's possible that Moz's index will leave out some of the lower-quality links. So, that might explain why you may see some discrepancies with what other tools may be showing.

As a result, some of these metrics, like Domain Authority, can experience some unexpected trends. In general, I'd recommend keeping in mind that all of these metrics are relative with respect to the other sites included in the index. So, the metrics will probably have some additional context when compared to sites similar to your own.

If you'd like some extra info on how to interpret and investigate metrics like DA, be sure to check out this blog post from Rand: https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Hope this helps to explain and we hope our next release will bring your scores back up! (Around end of March) Feel free to reach out if there's anything else I can help with!

Eli