Why would my domain authority drop 2 points in the last week?
-
My domain authority went from 51 to 49 in the last week. I haven't done any shady link building or really changed anything on the site. It is an ecommerce site so there is new product always added and we also have a full content magazine, so new content is added every monday and tuesday. The only thing that has happened is a press release went out on PRweb about a collaboration we've done.
-
Thanks! Very helpful!
-
Coincidentally, today I just came across this page for the first time and I remembered your question.
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority
The key takeaway I picked up on:
"We constantly refine this model over time. This means your website's Domain Authority score will often fluxuate. For this reason, it's best to use Domain Authority as a competitive metric against other sites as opposed to a historic measure of your internal SEO efforts."
-
In an effort to update more often, SEOmoz/OSE are crawling fewer URLs. Likely, it's not that something happened to your domain; it's the fact that fewer of your backlinks have actually been detected by Open Site Explorer.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/july-mozscape-update
FYI: My DA used to be 45 and now it's 41. I noticed that was because OSE wasn't detecting some of my backlinks that I know are still there. My advice would be not to worry too much, especially if your rankings haven't be affected.
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
-
50% Organic Traffic Drop In the last 48 Hours
Hello, My site had a 50% decrease in the last 48 hours (9/26/18) and I looking for ideas/reasons what would cause such a dramatic drop. Year to year organic traffic has been up 40% and September was up 30%. The site has a domain authority of 39 according to Moz and keywords positions have been flat for a few months. I made a change to the code and robots.txt file on Monday, pre-drop. The category pagination pages had a "NoIndex" with a rel =canonical and I removed the "NoIdnex" per: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-noindex-rel-canonical-confusion-26079.html. I also removed "Disallow" in the robots.txt for stuff like "/?dir" because the pages have the rel =canonical. Could this be the reason for drop?? Other possible reasons:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuck-layton
1. Google Update: I dont think this is it, but ti looks like the last one was August 1st: "Medic" Core Update — August 1, 2018
2. Site was hacked
3. All of keyword positions dropped overnight: I dont think this is it because Bing has also dropped at the same percentage. Any help, thoughts or suggestions would be awesome.0 -
Temporary Domain Changes
Hi All, Our development team needs to do a temporary site name change from www.sitename.com to new.sitename.com and then wants to return to www.sitename.com. They need to do this for the whole site due to how it's built with single sign on (SSO) and how certain post login pages utilize pre login pages and need to keep people logged in. This process is changing with a CMS upgrade and website and post login pages will be independent of the pre login pages moving forward. My question is what is the best way to manage this transition? Right now it seems like the best solution I've been able to work out with development is to reduce the domain shift down to one week and use 302 Redirects, don't index the new.sitename.com site, and for that week and take my lumps as they come from search. Looking for any other suggestion that may help marketing work with dev without casting blame on any teams for drops in organic traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dapacifi0 -
Domain Change Before or After Site Revamp?
In the last year traffic to our site has dropped in half and ranking has dropped significantly. Very little no content has been added in that time. We would now like to improve ranking by adding new content. 2 domains effectively exist for the site. The existing domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. But www.metro-manhattan.com redirects to www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Our company is Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc.. We registered www.metro-manhattan.com and created the redirect to www.nyc-officespace-leader.com in 2012. www.nyc-officespace-leader.com was registered in 2006. Many links to the site show www.metro-manhattan.com and I believe this may be a source of confusion for Google. Would it be best to make the domain consistent at this time by redirecting it once and for all and to do so before adding new content? If this is done correctly can we avoid taking a hit on ranking? Note: -www.nyc-officespace-leader.com is the old domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-www.metro-manhattan is the new domain but has existed since 2012 and has been redirecting to the old domain since then
-The company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space (similar in branding to the new domain) Am I correct in assuming that having the 2 domains may be causing issues with Google involving domain authority? Change the domain before adding content or add content before?0 -
Drop in Indexed pages
Hope everyone is having an Awesome December! I first noticed a drop in my index in the beginnings of November. My site drop in indexed pages from 1400 to 600 in the past 3-4 weeks. I don't know the cause of it, and would like the community to help me figure out why my indexing has dropped. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to read this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BSC0 -
Legal Client Wants to Change Domain Name... What's the best way to pass authority from old domain?
Hey Mozzers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhiteboardCreations
I received a call on Friday from a 6 attorney law office who have been my client for a long time. They have an established brand/domain in their market which isn't very big, but has a lot of competition. 2 of the attorneys are leaving to start their own firm and they want to remove a letter from their name abbreviation, thus their domain name as well. So, the other partners want to change the domain to reflect this. They want to buy a EMD [city]lawyers.com for about $1,600 along with some others to protect their new brand and name. I have a good idea as to what I need to do, BUT would love to hear advice from the community for this type of drastic change. 301 redirects? New Google Analytics code or same just different profile? Webmasters verifications? Content from old site? Old domain forwarding or keep active for a little bit? Is not the time to get them an SSL? Also, what should I prepare them for in terms of website traffic expectations and Google authority drops or remains the same? I know their Moz DA/PA will drop to 1/1, but anything else to look out for? Thank you in advance!
Fellow Pro Member - Patrick1 -
Following Penguin 2.0 hit in May, my site experienced another big drop on August 13th
Hi everyone, my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update in May. This was the first significant drop that the site has experienced since 2007, and I was initially concerned that the new website design I released in March was partly to blame. On further investigation, many spammy sites were found to be linking to my website, and I immediately contacted the sites, asked for the removal of the sites, before submitting a disavow file to Google. At the same time, I've had some great content written for my website over the last few months, which has attracted over 100 backlinks from some great websites, as well as lots of social media interaction. So, while I realise my site still needs a lot of work, I do believe I'm trying my best to do things in the correct manner. However, on August 11th, I received a message in Google WMTs : Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site I studied the table of internal links in WMTs and found that Google has been crawling many URLs throughout my site that I didn't necessarily intend it to find i.e. lots of URLs with filtering and sorting parameters added. As a result, many of my pages are showing in WMTs as having over 300,000 internal links!! I immediately tried to rectify this issue, updating the parameters section in WMTs to tell Google to ignore many of the URLs it comes across that have these filtering parameters attached. In addition, since my access logs were showing that Googlebot was frequently crawling all the URLs with parameters, I also added some Disallow entries to robots.txt to tell Google and the other spiders to ignore many of these URLs. So, I now feel that if Google crawls my site, it will not get bogged down in hundreds of thousands of identical pages and just see those URLs that are important to my business. However, two days later, on August 13th, my site experienced a further huge drop, so its now dropped by about 60-70% of what I would expect at this time of the year! (there is no sign of any manual webspam actions) My question is - do you think the solutions I've put in place over the last week could be to blame for the sudden drop, or do you think I'm taking the correct approach, and that the recent drop is probably due to Google getting bogged down in the crawling process. I'm not aware of any subsequent Penguin updates in recent days, so I'm guessing that this issue is somehow due to the internal structure of my new design. I don't know whether to roll back my recent changes or just sit tight and hope that it sorts itself out over the next few weeks when Google has more time to do a full crawl and observe the changes I've made. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. My website is ConcertHotels.com. Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
High Authority, What Value?
Hi there, We have recently had one of our products reviewed on the BBC, however there is no actual link going to our domain, it just mentions www.mydomain.com but not linking, does this have any value in SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Are sites that leave out www from domain at a disadvantage to domains with www in url
I know this has been discussed but was wondering what would be the best approach from an SEO perspective. I quite like the idea of setting up websites with domains without www but always worry that setting up domains without www has a disadvantage because user are use to referring to sites with the www included. Thus one of my fears are that users would link back using www version which will mean even if you do a 301 redirect that some of the link juice would be lost. I know some famous sites have used this convention such as http://searchenginewatch.com/ so think it would be possible but still concerned that for new sites it would be better to rather stick to conventions. What are your opinions about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SABest0