Domain authority decrease after open site explorer update. Reasons?
-
Hi!
I just noticed a decrease on our domain authority and also the page authority of several of our pages on the SeoMoz toolbar. For instance, DA went from 34 to 29. I was scared and confused, so I went to check it on the opensite explorer and saw that it had been updated.
I want to ask you guys if the same happened with your metrics or is it just us. Because the strange thing about it is that we have been doing some good optimization work lately and also some linkbuilding, and actually our SERP’s have been improving in general, and some specific ones have been performing great.
Our website is http://www.inmonova.com as a reference.
Can anyone cast some light into this?
-
Hey guys!
Keri is right - we have done some updating with our crawler and this index represents the newest version - unfortunately with a few hiccups. People seem to be seeing two issues with this new index - link counts and domain authorities are going up or down considerably and there is an increase of "questionable" inbound links.
Both issues are due to the same root cause: our new crawler is built to be fresher, but it is going deeper into domains, and, unfortunately not visiting as many domains. Domains with a high MozRank are getting crawled deeper, but domains with middle to lower MozRanks are not getting crawled.
Our top priority now is to get the domain diversity back up to or better than that of our last update as was originally designed. It's fixable and we will be focusing all efforts on this.
Previous crawling worked by selecting a list of the top MozRank URLs (around 10B) and then crawling one page from each of them. Now we are crawling links as we discover them, and crawling high MozRank sites daily, weekly or monthly. The advantage of the new crawlers is we are crawling all the time and so we will have fresher data. As links are added, we are much more likely to discover these deeper links. The new crawl had 59B urls, a lot more than the previous 42B, however, more of these links are from the same domain.
The reason for the "questionable" links is due to the fact that the crawler is reaching deeper into the domains where there are more download links. We are currently looking into fixing this so these won't be counted as links. We'll let you know as soon as that issue is resolved!
We are really sorry for the inconvenience. Once we have this new crawler dialed it will provide much fresher and higher quality data!!
Thanks,
Carin
-
Hey! Thanks a lot. I was a bit worried because the timing was just not very lucky for us.
There had been almost no SEO work, at leas no linkbuilding, for 2 years and we only started 2 months ago, so causality was making me wonder if we had been doing something wrong.
Your answers make me feel better. And yes, it's true that competitors have also gone through changes. Some have improved though (grrrrrrr.....).
Looking forward to the engineer's explanations!
-
Hi! Don't panic! This is part of the OSE algorithm update. The OSE engineers will be over here in the next few days to give some more explanation here, but wanted to let you know now that it isn't your website that had a big change.
-
We noticed the same decrease on three of our websites as well, and some of the competitors we track. One of our websites also went dramatically up (with many new questionable links). I believe this latest update of the link graph had some major changes that altered the domain authorities on a lot of websites. These numbers are all relative to everyone else, so hopefully this isn't an accurate reflection of how our websites are performing.
Good luck! Happy optimizing
Andrew
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
-
Removing Domains From Disavow File
We may have accidentally included the wrong domains in our Disavow file and have since removed most domains leaving the only very highly rated spammy links (using moz's new spam score)in the file. How long can it take for to google to recognise this change?ThanksMike
Moz Pro | | mlb70 -
I know our business listed in Yahoo and medranks.com (for example). But my open site explorer report doesn't show those. however on their sites, I see the listing. Why is this?
I know our business listed in Yahoo and medranks.com (for example). But my open site explorer report doesn't show those links on the inbound report. however on their respective sites, I see the listing when I search for us. And the link does work..... Why is this? Why don't I see it on the open site report?
Moz Pro | | cschwartzel0 -
I'm seeing duplicate links listed in open site explorer. Can anyone explain why this might be happening?
For each link listed in Open Site Explorer, I am seeing two identical entries. You can see why this might be a problem for both workflow and data accuracy. Any ideas why this might be happening? Is there a setting or filter that I'm missing?
Moz Pro | | StephenEggett0 -
Why do some sites have a higher Page Authority than Domain Authority in OSE??
Hi, I have noticed when using OSE and enter a domain you very often see a higher Page Authority than Domain Authority. If someone could explain why this would happen then I would be very grateful - its my current understanding that page authority would ALWAYS be LESS THAN Domain Authority but that is not always the case (I have seen cases where PA is more than 10 higher then DA) Here's an example where PA > DA http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?site=www.primelocation.com Thanks
Moz Pro | | James770 -
Is the Linkscape Index getting updated?
I know it only gets a big refresh once a month...The last being in the early part of January. But I released a map that went viral (front page of CNET, Wired, Scientific American) that has gotten me hundreds of links from different domains: https://www.google.com/search?q=perceptionbuilder.com+map I got these links in early to mid December and OSE is showing no data at all. Similarly, I have been doing some linkbuilding for clients and links that I got in October and November and those links aren't showing up either. Anyone else experiencing this? Many thanks, Matt
Moz Pro | | coppersix0 -
Page Rank and offline sites
I have a domain with PR6 according to the Historical Pagerank Checker. But that last PR was calculated 2 years ago. I brought the site back online a few days ago and have checked that many/most of the backlinks are still valid. It is now in the Google index but the Historical Pagerank Checker shows PR0. Will it get back its previous rank or something close to it? How long will it take?
Moz Pro | | DomainOptions0 -
Why isn't my Domain Authority much higher than my competitors'?
Looking at the Competitive Link Analysis report shows my domain outperforming my competitors on Domain MozRank, Domain MozTrust, total links, linking root domains, followed linking root domains, and linking c-blocks. But Domain Authority scores are very similar across all four sites with one competitor actually scoring higher than my domain. How should I unpick this result? I'm assuming that there must a problem with my link profile. Is that a valid assumption? Thanks, Tom fc7Ez.png
Moz Pro | | trbaldwin0 -
Open site explorer tool : domain authority
hi, According open explorer tool the site involved should improve its "domain authority" . So which is the fastest way for improving : Best content ? Backinks from authority domains ? Another technical adjustment ? Tks a lot ...
Moz Pro | | mozllo0