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.
Why is my domain authority so low?
-
Hello, a couple of years ago I started publishing on my site more than 10 posts a day of content that no one else had. For this reason, my competitors started paraphrasing my content without giving proper attribution, and they ranked better in Google.
That's why I realized that apart from creating content I had to work on my SEO, so I started to get some backlinks, most of them via contests on blogs. I am getting about 1 high quality link from PR2, PR3 or PR4 blogs each week. According to Open Site Explorer, I have 20 root domain links (200 total links). In reality I have more backlinks but they don't show up (they do show up in Ahrefs, about 50 root domains). To my surprise, I only have 15 Domain Authority.
This is the most evident example, take a look at this screenshot: http://imgur.com/dFk2rkx
My website is on the far left, two of my competitors on the right. As you can see I win every category except total links and the most important, domain authority. Are total links that important for Domain authority, even if 99% are internal? By the way, I also have more posts than these guys, I don't know why the report says otherwise. Why is the site on the right ranking so high?
The same thing happens with the rest of my competitors, they have a lot of low quality links from "lists of domain sites" and in general a lot of very spammy links.
According to what I have been reading, my good quality links should be more helpful than my competitors' spammy links, which should in fact affect them. So what is going on? I have no idea if I'm doing things right. Why is my domain authority so low? Thanks for your help.
-
Feel free to inmail me your url and I'll look at it more closely.
Best... Mike
-
Thanks again for your reply, I'll try your suggestion, I suspect internal linking might be the culprit. My site is fast, less than 2 seconds in pingdom tools, I am even using a CDN. Bounce rate has been a solid 42% the whole year.
But still, my question still stands, how come my domain authority appears so low in OSE compared to those other sites? To be honest it doesn't make any sense when you see the numbers...
-
If those comparisons are your main competitors and if they consistently/clearly outrank you, then I don't think the problem is in the numbers OSE shows. It could be alot of other things, including but not limted to internal linking, or CTR in SERPs (title tags) or user signals like bounce rate, or duplicate content or depth of content or site speed or downtime or a combination of those things and others.
On what you show in those comparisons and what you say about the quality of the back links etc, I would choose your link profile over theirs.
Consider making a spreadsheet of pages/terms where you are clearly beaten by these sites. Then, list across the top all of the different ranking factors you can think of. Then, fill in the info for your pages and your competitors and look for patterns. That's what I would do.
I hope that helps a little. Best... Mike
-
Hello, thank you for your answer.
I signed up for a Moz pro account less than a week ago, so I don't really know how long it's been like this.
My home page authority is marginally better compared tho these two sites, here is a screenshot: http://imgur.com/jd6pwzj
I am not ranking better than my main competitors on Google, I have searched for articles and most of my competitors usually rank better. Since I update my site a lot I am still getting around 5K uniques a day, but I know it could be much better.
Any suggestions? Thank you so much for your help.
-
That is frustrating. At the same time, it sounds like you're doing alot of right things.
Here are a few questions for you:
How long has it been at D/A 15?
What's your home page authority and how does that compare to these competitors?
How are the actual search results going in terms of, for instance, traffic to your site?
Just a note that Moz's tools, as good as they are, are not synonymous with how Google sees it.
Best... Mike
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
-
Redirecting dofollow, high-domain-authority links from one site to another: good idea?
I have two sites that offer help for freelance writers. The first gets almost no search traffic and is very low priority for me. The second is my main priority and gets substantial search traffic. The low-priority site has a significant number of dofollow backlinks from high-domain-authority sites. Is it a good idea to 301 redirect these links to similar/related posts on my high-priority site? Would this potentially boost the SEO of my high-priority site? Thanks for any help!
Link Building | Sep 24, 2018, 3:05 PM | John88990 -
My site is linked from over 900 "The Globe"-domains - disavow or not?
Hi! As some of you may be familiar with, there is a giant spam-network with the same design and same page title on all domains: "The Globe - The world's most visited web pages". For example: theglobe.at
Link Building | Nov 7, 2023, 5:07 PM | Sindre
theglobe.co.za
www.internet-search.us I've now discovered that over 900 of these spam-domains link to my site. My plan was of course to disavow them all, but Google is explicit on telling me to be careful. «Only disavow if you are certain that the links are damaging to your rankings». And to be honest, I'm not sure. Also: it seems drastic to disavow almost a thousand pages. I'm afraid to mess something up. What would you do?3 -
How you do guest posting on behalf of your clients? What do you use in the author bio - your name, client's name or a fake name?
I would like to hear from SEO agencies or link building teams - how you manage guest posting on behalf of your clients? 1. What is your outreach process - Do you pitch as a marketing manager or as a subject expert? 2. What do you mention in your author bio? Your name and your bio as outreach manager/ marketing manager? Your client's name and client's bio? A fake name - as a subject expertise? 3. Which email ID and contact details you use? - Your work ID/ client's ID/ Fake Gmail ID? I work for an SEO agency and I am interested in content and SEO related blog posts. But, I have many clients in the home improvement, real estate, food, fashion and other industries. I don't feel right to use my name when posting a guest blog on their behalf. What you guys prefer? Any thoughts?
Link Building | Jul 6, 2018, 10:25 PM | NSnidhi0 -
Backlinks from the Same Domain (But Different Pages)
Wayyy back when (in the days of yore) Mr Cutts spelled out in a video that page rank is distributed equally between the external links on the page. If there are two links on a page, each gets passed 50% of the available page rank etc. (Perhaps an oversimplification but bear with me). As a result of this, the company I worked for at the time (this was the dark ages when sidebar homepage links were in vogue) decreed that we would only ever approach a site about a link for a client once, as additional links had little extra SEO Value. Now you could argue that if there are 5 external links, each acquiring 20% of the power, and your site has 2 of those, you are getting 40% of the power, but lets forget the basic math for a minute. I have scoured the web and Mr Cutts' videos and I cannot find the answer to my question: If my site (Site A) has a backlink from SiteB Page 1, and a backlink from SiteB page 2 - does this count as two separate links in the eyes of Google? If the SAME site links out to my site, linking to different pages in different posts, does this give me more SEO benefit? Thanks for your time!
Link Building | Mar 19, 2015, 2:20 PM | Turkey0 -
How do we optimise links from a parent company to a subsidiary on different domains
So we are the agent for an industrial company. They don't have a great website (well its pretty but doesn't rank) and have 5 product pages with a variety of products on each. We've taken those products and turned them into 50 pages with good on page optimisation. Now they've just agreed to give us a link on each page and I'm trying to figure out what the best text and link will be. As far as I can see there are three options Visit our agent for X region - sending to the home page If you are from X region you can request a sample of product group from our agent - sending to home page and product category page on our site If you are looking for X, Y, Z or P, Q, R in this region contact our agent there. - sending to home page and individual product pages The aim of this is to boost my page authority as 98% of the top 10 in SERPS have pages with zero authority and rely on the on page optimization and DA. Is this the best approach or are there other better ways of approaching the problem. It's worth noting that there is a total separation of control and ownership of the websites. I'm also starting to work with them to improve their on page optimisation and get links from their parent company to increase link juice
Link Building | Jun 18, 2014, 2:49 PM | Zippy-Bungle0 -
What's more important page authority Vs domain authority?
Hello everyone, I am fairly new to SEO so I'm still trying to get my head round everything, I am currently looking into some back links .. well looking at competitor's back links to copy. I was just wondering what's more important page authority or domain authority? So for example if a page has a page authority of 50 and a domain authority of 10 is that better than if a page have page authority 10 and a domain authority of 50. Thanks so much in advance!
Link Building | Oct 5, 2013, 5:17 AM | vanplus1 -
What benefit does a site with a low DA get from someone guest posting who links to a site with a high DA?
I'm relatively new to link building and although this may be an obvious question I can't seem to find an answer anywhere even after searching Google.
Link Building | Oct 18, 2012, 12:56 PM | JoshED0 -
Do links from my own subdomain to my main domain carry any value?
I currently have a Wordpress blog set up on a subdomain i.e blog@ etc. I wanted to know whether the links from the blog to my main site carry any value.
Link Building | May 18, 2011, 3:12 AM | Store210