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 Authority important if we pursue longtail non-competitive keywords?
Hi, We currently have a relatively low DA score of 26. We have been working to increase it but of course it takes time. We are starting to adapt our approach and rank for non-competitive, long-tail keywords. If our DA is very low, will this affect our longtail keyword ranking even though there is very little competition for those? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cmavroudisyahoocom0 -
Why is wrong domain being indexed?
We have 2 domains: revolve.com and fwrd.com (unrelated to each other, but hosted on the same server). If you do a site search for revolve.com but enter a designer brand that is only carried on FWRD (not on Revolve), the domain "revolve.com" pops up in the SERP, which is redirected to FWRD.com. Ex. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site%3Awww.revolve.com isabel marant Why is Google indexing the revolve.com pages, which don't actually exist? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
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 -
Domain Authority... http://www.domain.com/ vs. http://domain.com vs. http://domain.com/
Hey Guys, Looking at Page Authority for my Site and ranking them in Decending Order, I see these 3 http://www.domain.com/ | Authority 62 http://domain.com | Authority 52 http://domain.com/ | Authority 52 Since the first one listed has the highest Authority, should I be using a 301 redirects on the lower ranking variations (which I understand how works) or should I be using rel="canonical" (which I don't really understand how it works) Also, if this is a problem that I should address, should we see a significant boost if fixed? Thanks ahead of time for anyone who can help a lost sailor who doesn't know how to sail and probably shouldn't have left shore in the first place. Cheers ZP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr_Snack0 -
Impact of Domain Authority on Keyword ranking
Experts Please advise if there is any impact on Keyword rankings due to high or low Domain authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | INN0 -
Domain authority imrpovement
Hi all, I'm trying to increase the domain authority of the www.gpmsummit.com. Is there any advice to improve it efficiently? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WTGEvents0 -
Stability in the rankings - Domain mapping
Tues domain mapping of multiple (more than 180) urls to a single address can harm rankeamento these urls? I have the following scenario… Mapping domain addresses: www.meusitecidade01.com www.meusitecidade02.com www.meusitecidade03.com ... www.meusitecidade181.com to: www.meusite.com where I have a index.php page which will assemble according to the url mapped. This could be hurting my SEO in any way? There has been a lot of stability in the rankings (not google dance) some of these urls for some keywords and unique pecularidade see that, relative to other site, is the above scenario.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eder.machado0 -
Author Tag - How do you get your Author Thumbnail on more then one site?
Ive managed to set up the Rel:Author tag on my wordpress site, and the thumbnail is now showing in Google search results Each article I write on my blog has a link to me Author page, which has on it a link to my Google Plus page. So this works great. However I write articles for another few websites and would like to get my author thumbnail image showing for them articles too. How do I do this? Do I need an Author page on the other sites also? I dont think I'll be able to get an author page on the other sites, is it not possible to somehow link direct from the article to my G+ page? How would guest articles work too? Any ideas? Thanks in advance guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0