Falling Domain Authority
-
What are the factors that would cause my domain authority to fall? As best I understand it, we would have to be losing links. For example, one of my clients started with a DA around 60 and now 4 months on it is sitting around 47.
This has happened with a couple clients and I'm not really sure why or how to counteract it.
-
Hi Joshua,
You are essentially correct, but it could be a number of factors. Off the top of my head, and this is by no means a complete list of possibilities, the reasons for a loss of DA could be caused by:
- As you stated, losing links. It's estimated that each year over 50% of the entire web "disappears". Most of this is junk, but it happens to good links as well
- For one reason or another, Linkscape didn't find certain links during it's last crawl of the web. They may reappear during the next update.
- The sites linking to you lost Domain Authority themselves. This would effect your score
- Natural changes in Linkscape from update to update. SEOmoz is constantly improving how it crawls the web (and sometimes there's some rough spot around the edges) which causes natural fluctuation in link metrics. When this happens, it's best to use DA not as a historical measure of your own site, but as a competitive measure against your competitors. If your DA fell, it's possible your competitors DA fell as well and you are just as strong.
More than likely, it's a combination of several factors. Usually, it's nothing to worry about unless you see it correspond to a traffic drop as well. Hopefully your DA will be back up during the next update.
-
This is a common perception, but this applies more to Page Authority than Domain Authority.
Each domain has one DA score, which applies to the entire site. Domain Authority is the "grandaddy" metric that takes all the other metrics into consideration, including Page Authority and MozTrust.
Page Authority, on the other hand, flows between individual pages. So in this situation, a large number of new pages without new links will most likely have low Page Authority, but the DA for the site as a whole remains the same.
-
According to SEOmoz there are over 150 signals included in DA calculation. Of course links would be your usual suspect here but as Phil Gross said you should revisit all the changes you've made in the past months.
-
Good add!
-
I think that another factor that could reduce domain authority is if you add a significant number of additional pages to your site without earning a proportional number of new inbound links. This would dilute the authority across the domain.
-
Joshua,
I would certainly look into where your link building strategies built your links into. There is a possibility that your site has placed inbound links on a spam site or a network that was hit. Other items may include quality level of content. If you are not using original authoritative content you could see a shit. One initial question is how has this impacted rankings for your primary keyword sets?
Revisit any work over the last 4 months you have done, you may have done some dev work that is negatively impacting you? What is your Google Webmasters Account saying? Has your page load time slowed down? Have you changed server environments? There are certainly a number of possibilities. If several of our clients are experiencing the same thing and you are hosting then look at the hosting level. If you are in a shared hosting environment then a spam site on the same server could impact you.
-Phil G
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
-
Domain authority drop
Hi SEOmoz gurus, The last 2 months I am seeing a drop in the Domain authority for some of my clients. Some of them are old sites. Some are new (less than 6 months old) For the old sites I thought the reason for the drop might be caused by discounting the value of low quality backlinks. But this cannot be the case for the new sites - they have high quality backlinks from newspapers and I can't make any sense of the drop. Has anyone else experienced the same issue? Might this be caused by a change in SEOmoz algorithm? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | ParisChildress0 -
What is more important, page authority or linking root domains?
I have 2 pages in my report that are identical: www.ferringway.com (more page authority......21 vs. 1) www.ferringway.com/index.php (more linking root domains...... 40 vs. 21) Which one should I delete or should I do something like a 301 redirect? Your help is greatly appreciated! Sheryl
Moz Pro | | TOMMarketingLtd.0 -
How do I increase domain authority? Real Estate SIte
I have a site that is just a few months old. How do I get the domain authority up?
Moz Pro | | bronxpad0 -
Twitter Page Authority Score?
I've been doing some competitive research in Open Site Explorer and many of our competitors have Twitter accounts very similar to ours. Their Twitter pages are usually one of the pages with linking to their website with the most Page Authority. The incoming links from Twitter are a "no follow" as you would guess. This has been the case for a large number of well ranking sites I have looked at. www.dremed.com also has a Twitter account at: https://twitter.com/#!/DREmed . However, Open Site Explorer does not list the Twitter link as an incoming link at all ( or if it does it has no Page Authority ). The Twitter account page seems very similar in nature to other competing Twitter pages. I'm not sure why it does not ALSO pull a high Page Authority score??? Do you know why this might be? Best, Justin
Moz Pro | | justinjeffries0 -
In OSE "Followed Linking Root Domains" = "links from homepages"
In OSE's, "Followed Linking Root Domains" are defined as "The number of root domains that have at least one followed link to a page or domain." Does this mean that if one of my competitors has, let's say, 1000 followed linking root domains, they have a link pointing to them on the homepage of 1000 other sites? Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | gerardoH0 -
Why is the linking root domains count not increasing
For the last month I have been tracking my backlinks thru open site explorer. Over the same period I have gone on a minor link building exercise via social media, some directories as well as writing fresh new content for the site. However, my backlink count has increased in the Rank Tracker tool but my root linking domains have remain at the same level. Is there a lag or is this because some of these site are not in the open site index? To be specific - I have personally setup follow links from sites like tumblr, posterous, stumbleUpon, delicious and other like these. Would really like to understand the limitations so I can take the appropriate action. Thanks
Moz Pro | | versinge0 -
Why did Domain Authority go up so much? Did you change your measurement?
Our Domain Authority has been at 42 or 43 for a couple months and it just increased to 54. Why did this happen? I would like to think that it is because of out SEO and linkbuilding work. However, I suspect something else may be involved because the 3 competitors we track also all increased between 10 to 25 points at the same time. What happened? Did you make changes in the way you score DA or is this the result of changes in what pages you crawl? Or what?
Moz Pro | | rickt0070