Domain Authority and Links drastically decreased in less than a month
-
I'm fairly new to SEO, and am left completely perplexed about why our two SEO client's links and DA decreased so drastically in so little time.
Looking at their stats on Moz, between May and June, their DA's went down by 3-5 (which, they were fairly low to begin with), and external links were halved! This is rather concerning to me as building their external links has been my focus for the past few months for both of them.
There are a number of tweaks that I could make to site structure in terms of meta descriptions and page title length (though I can't fix that as the clients want to keep the titles as is), however there are no critical errors. I have also placed a lot of filters on both of their Google Analytics pages as they were getting what I just now realized was a ton of spam, though I don't see how that would affect anything.
I just can't imagine what lead to all of those external link suddenly dropping. I imagine the drastic drop in those lead to the DA decrease, but again, I'm very new, so I'm not certain.
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. I have been panicking quite a bit since I've seen this!
-
Sure thing, those posts from May were probably after the last release of the index (May 5th). Hopefully you will see your site's DA return to a similar level, or even higher with the next release of the Index (scheduled June 23rd). Here are a few additional threads with more explanation. Nothing to worry about, you're not alone.
http://moz.com/community/q/what-s-the-story-on-mozscape-updates
http://moz.com/community/q/what-causes-total-external-links-to-fluctuate-so-much
http://moz.com/community/q/significant-drop-in-external-followed-links -
Ah, I had read about that change in a similar post from May, and thought it had been resolved. Thank you for the quick response. Will try to turn off the panic now!
-
Other users have experienced similar things with the most recent MozScape index since it was smaller than previous ones. There should be a new update coming in about two weeks, that will be a good opportunity to measure results and compare with previous Indexes. Since your client's sites don't have many links to begin with, even small variations in the index could cause major shifts in the site's DA. Check out this thread below for an explanation, it sounds like you're experiencing a similar situation.
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
-
Drop in Domain Authority
Hi there, Our domain Authority has dropped significantly from 26 to 19 over the last month. This had been fairly stable over the previous 18 months. We haven't done any significant work to the website that I could point to. Does anyone have any ideas why this would happen? Any recent Google Updates that could be the cause? Regards Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | andy_simpson1 -
Will noindex pages still get link equity?
We think we get link equity from some large travel domains to white label versions of our main website. These pages are noindex because they're the same URLs and content as our main B2C website and have canonicals to the pages we want indexed. Question is, is there REALLY link equity to pages on our domain which have "noindex,nofollow" on them? Secondly we're looking to put all these white label pages on a separate structure, to better protect our main indexed pages from duplicate content risks. The best bet would be to put them on a sub folder rather than a subdomain, yes? That way, even though the pages are still noindex, we'd get link equity from these big domains to www.ourdomain.com/subfolder where we wouldn't to subdomain.ourdomain.com? Thank you!
Reporting & Analytics | | HTXSEO0 -
Direct Traffic has Drastically Increased
Hi, I have noticed in Google analytics that direct traffic of one of my website is increased drastically. I didn't participate in Email Marketing or any other paid campaigns however direct traffic is continuously increasing. I checked all sources, locations, browsers, filters etc but didn't get any findings. Please help.
Reporting & Analytics | | RuchiPardal0 -
Multiple-Domain tracking for sister sites- NO retail checkout- Please help
Hello, I have about 5 sites I want to set up multiple-domain tracking in google analytics. All posts I read seem to be focused on cross-domain tracking for the purpose of tracking a visitor from one domain across another domain for shopping cart check outs. I don't need that. I have about 3 sister sites (mastersite.com, sistersite1.com, sistersite2.com, sistersite3.com) related to my primary site. I want 1 Master Analytics Profile to track traffic for all of these sites combined. My visitors will not jump from mastersite.com over to sistersite1.com. There will be no cross-domain visits. How can I set up 1 master google analytics profile that will aggregate traffic data from all sites and present the data to me in one analytics profile. Please help
Reporting & Analytics | | AndreGant0 -
Why is my Technorati link no longer showing?
Hi, i had a Technorati link as my lop link showing in SEOmoz. its no longer showing. I verified that the blog is still listed with them. Does anyone know why that link is not in the campaign...or showing up in site explorer? Thanks, Kevin
Reporting & Analytics | | yandl0 -
Cross domain tracking setup in Google Analytics
I really need help on this, I can't figure it out. I need to track a few subdomains and and couple of seperate domains in one profile in Google Analytics. So I have: www.maindomain.co.uk sub1.maindomain.co.uk sub2.maindomain.co.uk www.anotherdomain.co.uk So the code I have placed on all of these domains is as following: I have then set up seperate profiles which filter out the data by domain. E.g. for sub1.maindomain.co.uk, I have user the fitler: Custom filter > Include > Filter Field = Hostname > Filter Pattern = sub1.maindomain.co.uk For the www.anotherdomain.co.uk, I have used the same filter. Now this all seems to be tracking visits and unique visitors okay, but I always have a very low pageview count, less than visits and sometimes zero. Could anyone shed any light on what I am doing wrong? Thanks in advance mozzers.
Reporting & Analytics | | MirandaP0 -
How to locate a back link
GWT says that a large popular site with DA 70 has a link to one of our recently published pages. Is it possible to find the location of that link using GWT? I don't think the SEOmoz tools can find it, perhaps because our page is too new. Best,
Reporting & Analytics | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
High percentage of nofollow links
Hi, I've just created my first campaign and noticed that on the competitive analysis our website is having a lot of nofollow links: more than 50% I did some research on the web to learn more about nofollow links, but I don't understand why this percentage is so big especially compared to the other websites in the analysis (less than 10%)? Anyone any ideas? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | poupette0