My Domain authority dropped 9 points... Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this significant drop.
-
My domain authority dropped by 9 points and I haven't done anything differently since the last scan. What is going on?
-
I noticed some big drops in the sites I monitor this update as well, yet rankings and traffic are business as usual.
Patrick's link is helpful as are other's comments. The other thing I'd suggest is to monitor traffic, rankings and webmaster tools to make sure nothing is seriously wrong. If nothing arouses your suspicion, wait for the next update. This one was smaller than the last, root domains down by almost 10%. If you have a site with few incoming link sources, you're going to be more susceptible to sampling fluctuations.
-
You should not look at Moz's domain authority as a fixed number; it will change, depending on their index that month. A good way to look at this number is relative to a couple of your competitors. Track them, and if their number also goes down when yours goes down, it is probably the index.
-
You are not alone, my site dropped 6 points and my competitors that I am tracking also dropped anywhere from 3-5 points as well.
-
Hi there
Rand actually just gave some insight to this in another Q+A thread; I recommend reading it!
Hope this helps - good luck!
-
I wonder if Moz has recently modified their domain authority algorithm to take into consideration Google's mobile-friendly or "Phantom" updates?
-
Domain Authority is not really something you can control. It is a view taken by Moz, Google etc using various algorithms. So now you cannot influence the rank easily.
I would recommend stepping way way back and take a broad view of your site and look at some of the key Domain ranking factors that Google (might, as we can guess but they don't tell) use.
Dropping a factor of 9 is large, so something must have changed in the bigger picture.
Bear in mind that just because the numbers have gone down, does not mean that your site has had a penalty or other such disaster, it could well be that your Pond just became a Sea for some reasons, which you need to take a view on in your broad overview of your industry.
Please let us know how you get on as this would be very interesting to all Mozers I am sure
Bruce
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
-
Redirection of 100 domain to Main domain affects SEO?
Hi guys, An email software vendor managed by a different area of my company redirected 100 domains used for unsolicited email campaigns to my main domain. These domains are very likely to get blacklisted at some point. My SEO tool now is showing me all those domains as "linking" to my main site as do-follow links. The vendor states that this will not affect my main domain/website in any way. I'm highly concerned. I would appreciate your professional opinion about this. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anagentile0 -
Using a Sub Domain as a Main Domain?
Hi, I'm working on a site at the moment and the sub domain is acting as the main domain. This occurred when the site was redesigned and built on a sub domain for testing but it was never moved to the main domain when it went live (a couple of years ago). So little or no pages are live on domain.com but all on sub.domain.com. It's a large company but they have very poor rankings. Would you recommend that they move the sub domain back into the root folder? Does this involve renaming/re-pointing URLs? Thanks Louise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MVIreland1 -
Is This Worth Fixing?
Hi, I'm working on a site that was last optimized some years ago. It has a fair number of pages that the url, h1, title tag and image alt exact match. Although this comes back as A+ in Moz's on page grader, it seems a bit much. What do you think, is all this too heavy an SEO fingerprint for Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Renaming your domain from an existing live domain and SEO implications - Please Help *shudder*
Please see the details below. Site A: http://south-african-holiday.mobi is an existing site that is our best site. It is Joomla 3.1 and runs all our ecommerce. Site B: http//www.southerncircle.com/ is our original and has the best DA but is out of date and pretty clunky. joomla 1.5 and all bookings (tour site) are redirected to Site A for processing. Instead of redesigning the Site A I'd like to change the domain name of http://south-african-holiday.mobi -> http://southerncircle.com So far my reading and research (Thanks MOZ for awesome forum!) has provided me with: 1. Do the SEO groundwork. i.e. remove dead links from both sites. Delete useless content and generally tidy up both sites. 2. Map all pages from site a: http://southerncircle.com -> http://south-africa-holiday/ so that the existing pages that have good ranking will have a home on the new site. 3. When ready do a small sample 301 redirect from: http://southerncircle.com to http://south-africa-holiday.mobi. 4. arghhhh now I'm stuck ..... If I redirect to this site then I lose my http://southerncircle.com domain which is what I want to keep....I just want the .mobi site to move to the southerncircle.com site.... I don't consider myself totally thick but this is really confuseing the *$%# out of me PLEASE could you give me some insight here. I'm sure it has been done before without completely losing the sites seo ranking and sending my site into SEO oblivion. If there are any JOOMLA gurus that have done this I'd love to hear from you as well. Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SoutherlySwell0 -
Can anyone explain this?
On Sunday 26th May, for about 40 minutes, we had about 25-30 direct visits from San Jose (we are a UK site). During this time our rankings increased dramatically and then as soon as the direct visits disappeared, our rankings went back to how they were prior to them visiting the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonnygeeuk0 -
Multiple domain level redirects to unique sub-folder on one domain...
Hi, I have a restaurant menu directory listing website (for example www.menus.com). Restaurant can have there menu listed on this site along with other details such as opening hours, photos ect. An example of a restaurant url might be www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza. A feature i would like to offer is the ability for Bob's pizza to use the menus.com website listing as his own website (let assume he has no website currently). I would like to purchase www.bobspizza.com and 301 redirect to www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza Why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrails
So bob can then list bobspizza.com on his advertising material (business cards etc, rather than www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza). I was considering using a 301 redirect for this though have been told that too many domain level redirects to one single domain can be flagged as spam by Google. Is there any other way to achieve this outcome without being penalised? Rel canonical url, url masking? Other things to note: It is fine if www.bobspizza.com is NOT listed in search results. I would ideally like any link juice pointing to www.bobspizza.com to pass onto www.menus.com though this is a nice to have. If it comes at the cost of being penalised i can live without the link juice from this. Thanks0 -
Purchased a high ranking domain and want to transfer my site to the new domain
I recently purchased a highly ranked domain. The link profile is very good and I don't want to lose to many links however I want to transfer my site to that domain. What is the best way of doing this without losing the current rank on search engines? Also how much does the transfer of registrar information impact my SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydop0 -
Bad neighborhood linking - anyone can share experience how significant it can impact rankings?
SEOMoz community, If you have followed our latest Q&A posts you know by now that we have been suffering since the last 8 months from a severe Google penalty we are still trying to resolve. Our international portfolio of sports properties has suffered significant ranking losses across the board. While we have been tediously trying to troubleshoot the problem for a while now we might be up to a hot lead now. We realized that one of the properties outside of our key properties, but are site that our key properties are heavily linking to (+100 outgoing links per property) seems to have received a significant Google penalty in a sense that it has been completely delisted from the Google index and lost all its PageRank (Pr4) While we are buffed to see such sort of delisting, we are hopeful that this might be the core of our experienced issues in the past i.e. that our key properties have been devalued due to heavy linking to a bad neighborhood site. My question two the community are two-fold: Can anyone share any experience if it is indeed considered possible that a high number of external links to one bad neighboorhood domain can cause significant ranking drops in the rank from being top 3 ranked to be ranked at around a 140 for a competetive key word? The busted site has a large set of high quality external links. If we swap domains is there any way to port over any link juice or will the penalty be passed along? If that is the case I assume the best approach would be to reach out to all the link authorities and have tem link to the new domain instead of the busted site? Thanks /Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0