Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Get found
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Domain Authority dropped 10 points and I don't know why

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Domain Authority dropped 10 points and I don't know why

    Technical SEO
    domain authority optimization
    3
    3
    2398
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • LisaBabblebird
      LisaBabblebird Subscriber last edited by

      In my latest site crawl, the domain authority dropped 10 points for no apparent reason. There have been no changes to the site. The only change I have made this month is to block referral spam to the site. My competitors' DAs have stayed the same too.

      website name: https://knowledgefront.co.uk/

      Any ideas?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • RaviKumarRana
        RaviKumarRana last edited by

        Check for incoming links and see if there's any pattern. Check referral traffic and see if any bot traffic is landing on your website or not. Try the following steps:

        1. Create a filter in analytics
        2. Block spam IPs
        3. Block bot traffic to land on your website.
        4. Create quality backlinks
        5. Find out pages that are performing lower in SERP i.e. 5,6,7 or 8,9th positions. Optimize them and push them for better CTR.

        Once you are done, submit sitemap and wait for some time, I hope this will help you out recovering the lost DA as it works for me.

        Regards,
        Ravi Kumar Rana
        TheSEOGuy

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • PaintedBrickDigital
          PaintedBrickDigital last edited by

          @lisababblebird said in Domain Authority dropped 10 points and I don't know why:

          https://knowledgefront.co.uk/

          With just a quick look, you've got 53ish links and many of them are questionable at best, or directory links.

          So, link quality may be an issue, also, did you manually disavow links? If so, you probably just brought unwanted attention to your site.

          We never tell clients to disavow on their own... only if they receive a manual penalty do we take that step.

          Instead, focus on building actual valuable links as Google and other search engines have gotten pretty good at recognizing and ignoring spam links on their own.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • 1 / 1
          • First post
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          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.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • g3mmab

            Unsolved Huge Increase In Internal Links + Domain Authority Tanked

            internal linking domain authority

            Hey, I am very concerned about the link metrics I am seeing, really hoping someone can help. In October last year there were a total of 34.7K 'total links' attributed to my E-commerce website . This compared to 41.2k and 213k links attributed to my two main competitors. In November, my website had a forced update due to incompatibility issues my shopping cart version was having with the server on which it is hosted. (I was told by my web developers / hosting company that their server was upgraded.) This update created many problems such as checkout issues, page layout issues, sitemaps not automatically regenerating and the big one - it reverted back to http instead of https. Along with my developers, I spent 2 weeks fixing all of the issues until everything worked correctly and https was reinstated. After initial warnings from Moz, I have not received any critical crawler issues or warnings, big ranking drops etc since November. I was satisfied that all was ok. However, in November my 'total links' jumped to 81.5k and have since continued to balloon. December - 309.1k, January -335k, February - 665k, March - 716k, April - 719k, May - 742k, June - 751k. In the same period (November - June), my external links went from 5.3k - 8.7k. So it appears the huge increase in links are internal. In my latest report it states that 'internal follow links' are up by 8k and 'internal no follow links' are up by 1k. This is insane. I cannot understand why I have so many internal links and why they keep increasing. I maintain the website with updates, blog articles etc but no more than I have in the past several years. Worryingly, once this increase in links started being reported, my Domain Authority has also tanked. In October my DA was 37 (higher than my competitors) and has since dropped as low as 19. It has gone up to 21 this month (still significantly lower than my competitors). I have spent hours researching why this huge increase in internal links could be happening but have got nowhere. If anyone could advise what the issue could be and how I can fix it, I would be eternally grateful. Issues I have discovered along the way that may help with analysis:
            My site has many 404s (hundreds) - all relate to urls of old images that have been removed from the website. The 'Top Hits' on my website are from blogs (some spammy) to these deleted image urls that return a 404. I don't use any plugins. I do get 'duplicate content' notices as my blog posts archive themselves and generate new urls - as an example - 'blog post name' archived December 2023. It may be the case that the old http urls have been redirected to https but I have no warnings for 'redirect issues' in Moz. Thanks for taking the time to read this and thanks in advance for any help.

            Link Explorer | | g3mmab
            0
          • iamshrawan

            Unsolved It's been 2 years and my Domain authority is not changing

            domain domain analysis domain authority domain author

            It's been 2 years and my Domain authority is not changing. I have been making so many quality links but domain authority does not increase or decrease for my website Tricky enough.
            Can anyone help with what is the problem with my website?

            Link Explorer | | iamshrawan
            0
          • jgresalfi

            If I'm using a compressed sitemap (sitemap.xml.gz) that's the URL that gets submitted to webmaster tools, correct?

            I just want to verify that if a compressed sitemap file is being used, then the URL that gets submitted to Google, Bing, etc and the URL that's used in the robots.txt indicates that it's a compressed file. For example, "sitemap.xml.gz" -- thanks!

            Technical SEO | | jgresalfi
            0
          • the-gate-films

            URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?

            I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.

            Technical SEO | | the-gate-films
            0
          • KempRugeLawGroup

            Why Can't Googlebot Fetch Its Own Map on Our Site?

            I created a custom map using google maps creator and I embedded it on our site. However, when I ran the fetch and render through Search Console, it said it was blocked by our robots.txt file. I read in the Search Console Help section that: 'For resources blocked by robots.txt files that you don't own, reach out to the resource site owners and ask them to unblock those resources to Googlebot." I did not setup our robtos.txt file. However, I can't imagine it would be setup to block google from crawling a map. i will look into that, but before I go messing with it (since I'm not familiar with it) does google automatically block their maps from their own googlebot? Has anyone encountered this before? Here is what the robot.txt file says in Search Console: User-agent: * Allow: /maps/api/js? Allow: /maps/api/js/DirectionsService.Route Allow: /maps/api/js/DistanceMatrixService.GetDistanceMatrix Allow: /maps/api/js/ElevationService.GetElevationForLine Allow: /maps/api/js/GeocodeService.Search Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetFeature Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetOverlays Allow: /maps/api/js/LayersService.GetFeature Disallow: / Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben

            Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup
            1
          • IgorMateski

            Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more

            Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂

            Technical SEO | | IgorMateski
            0
          • rhoadesjohn

            The word 'shop' in a page title

            I'm reworking most of the page titles on our site and I'm considering the use of the word 'Shop' before a product category. ex.  Shop 'keyword' | Brand Name As opposed to just using the keyword sans 'Shop.'  Some of the keywords are very generic, especially for a top level category page. Question: Is the word 'Shop' damaging my SEO efforts in any way?

            Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn
            0
          • sboelter

            Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains

            Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's  pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:"  for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP.  This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain.  We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w.  This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index.  However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain.  When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain.  So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301.  But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains.  Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing?   These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing.  Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.

            Technical SEO | | sboelter
            0

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Digital Marketers
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter

          Access all your tools in one place. Whether you're tracking progress or analyzing data, everything you need is at your fingertips.

          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2026 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.