Domain Authority? Why is it declining according to Moz?
-
So I know what good SEO is, I am performing very well for this client but for some reason Moz Pro is saying their domain authority is declining with each index? Anything I can look into specifically to stop this from happening?
-
Thanks everyone, every bit of info was very much appreciated!
-
I agree with everyone here (thanks, guys!), and I want to add that DA and PA are both most useful when benchmarking against competitors, not as an absolute value.
Take this scenario—a high-authority industry site links to a large number of other sites in the same industry, and they all benefit from its authority. But if for whatever reason that site goes down or loses authority, all sites it links to could be affected. That could conceivably bring down the DA of a major portion of the vertical.
None of those sites did anything wrong, and since they're each others' main SERP competitors, their rankings may not change at all. But they'll now all have lower DA.
Does that help at all?
-
I think you may also need to look into what Rand said here: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here
According to Rand, Moz is indexing a bit of different stuff lately. This means that DA & PA will change depending on the link comp of your site.
I would start there - and not worry much about it. PA & DA are guides but don't determine your rankings.
-
In addition to the good things said by others
check your backlink profile versus your competitors, probably they are getting more backlinks or more authoritative ones, or maybe your old backlinks are poor quality and dropping in value,
check your backlink profile for anchor diversity and cross check with your competitors
are you having traffic drops? Maybe not overall, but hidden in some traffic segments? are those drops linked to a dropping ranking for some keywords? If so why? Increasing competition? Due to some backlink related issues? See above.
is your content quality dropping compared to your competitors? are you serving pages with thin content and your competitors are offering better content? Less duplicate? More targeted?
i could go on, but this is at least where I would start my homework
-
You may want to rely on more then just one site's DA metric to make your actual assessment. Moz's number while helpful is just a very educated guess; which can not take into account all the factors. What is most important is conversion rates, sales, or keyword rankings depending on what your goal is.
It is not uncommon for our DA to go up or down a few points month to month. This usually has a correlation to how many linking domains and the like the crawl comes back with. Not ever site will get scanned every crawl, so this number doesn't play a huge role in how successful I view my efforts.
Hope that helps,
Don
-
Because domain authority is capped at 100, it has to be a comparison of how the assets of your website compare to the assets of every other website out there.
To increase your domain authority, you must increase the assets of your site faster in comparison to all of the other sites on the web. So, a person could be working to improve their website and actually make progress, but domain authority could drop because other websites are doing more.
Rankings operate the same way. If you improve your website, but your competitor improves his more, then you will not advance to a position above him, even though you might have done a ton of work.
This is a very simplified explanation.
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 dominance
I've just started to work for a company who've purchased masses of domains with every conceivable permutation based on all their products with every extension possible e.g .biz . eu. .net (including .co.uk and .com of course). I have two questions: 1. Is it worth keeping all these (they want to add more) domains or let them expire? 2. All the purchased domains are online - is there any point (they redirect with a 301)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LJHopkins0 -
980 links from 75 domains and Graded "A" on Moz Page Grader-- still not ranking for our term. Thoughts?
A few additional interesting details: A blog post we wrote with the same keyword ranks 8, but this page does not crack the top 20. Crazy competitive term-- top SERP are from HBR, Entrepreneur and Inc. We use Instapage as landing page builder-- could this effect our rankings? URL is not a subdomain Pretty stumped over here. Thanks y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbernes220 -
Using pictures from another domain
We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer. Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server. There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues. Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues? will this generate Google penalties? Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it. We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters. How important is the file name for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S0 -
Guest Blogging Results - domain authority vs. page authority -
I have been guest blogging on various websites. The web pages that display my guest posts have zero page authority but a great domain authority of 60/100 or more. 2 links I developed are noted below as examples: http://www.evancarmichael.com/Small-Business-Consulting/8101/How-To-Hire-Extraordinary-Salespeople.html https://www.biggerpockets.com/blogs/4195/blog_posts/28772-4-essentials-for-rental-property-owners Am I wasting my time with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | superZj
Thank you!0 -
Local TLD Domain and languages.
Hello all, I have a local tld domain in spanish for .es. Now i want to translate the site content to english and german. What do you advice? 1.1 www.domainname.es/en/ and www.domainname.es/de/ 1.2 en.domainname.es and de.domainname.es Or buy a new .com domain and set it like this: 2.1. www.domainname.com and www.domainname.com/de (english will be main language) 2.2. en.domainname.com and de.domainname.com Or the last option ( the one i think it's better) Local TLDs 3.1 www.domainame.es , www.domainname.co.uk , and domainname.de In this last case , the domain name is KW + Brand , should i also translate the KW? For example: www.heladosolimpia.es , www.icecreamolimpia.co.uk Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Barbio0 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
Domain Name with Numeric Digit
If I use a Domain Name with a Numeric Digit, would it in any way harm the SEO and Google Ranking of my page? This Question is only from point of view of SEO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaranBatra0 -
Do any of you regularly use expired domains?
I know there has been discussion on using expired domains in the past. This is not so much a question as to how to do it or whether it works, but rather I would love to see how many of you use this in your backlink strategy. I have a domain in a low to moderately competitive niche that ranks really well, mostly on the power of a couple of expired domains. I bought the domains, created a quick wordpress site and pointed some anchor texted links to the site. It took some time for the expired domains to regain their PR, but when they did, the benefit was great. I'm considering whether I want to do this with another domain of mine. On one hand, it's a relatively inexpensive way to get some good quality anchor texted links. But, on the other hand, something in it feels "immoral" or "sneaky" to me. What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0