DAs dropped for many pages?
-
I recently noticed that the domain authorities dropped by 5 or 6 points for us and for our competitors. And for many other pages that I check regularly. Was the algorithm changed or is it just me?
-
These other folks left some fantastic responses, so I'll only add that DA is a relativistic number generated each update. It's best use case is to compare yourself to other sites, so if both you and your competitor dropped a similar amount, that's actually not a bad thing.
-
Hi there,
DA is a fantastic metric to compare domain strength and judge their overall backlink profile and ability to rank. However, it is not a good metric to Trend to show domain improvement. Simply put, the metric data set is different with every Linkscape update.
If you go to the Open Site Explorer homepage, you will see that the recent crawl contains 189 billion URLs. That's an amazing number. Their next crawl could theoretically cover 238 billion URLs. You may have hundreds of additional backlinks found in those extra 3 billion pages crawled. Your DA goes up, despite you doing nothing to the website. Most likely, your competitors DA goes up as well.
The next update may only crawl 179 billion URLs. It doesn't crawl 100s of pages with your links. Your DA goes down. So do your competitors.
Simply put, it is a sample size of backlinks. It is great for comparing one domain to another, due to the data being based off of the same sample size. It's great for competitor insights and analysis.
When your DA goes down, that doesn't necessarily mean your site is less authoritative. If you still have links pointing to your website, you don't lose that equity because Moz had a smaller crawl. Remember, DA is a marketing metric, but not a Google ranking factor.
Hope it helps you
-
Its not to do with losing links, its a score out of 100, so a drop isn't always a bad signal. Because the score is out of 100, you can't keep on increasing indefinitely.
Its probably Moz has crawled further and deeper and has a a refresh of data as it now knows more.
You have to compare your score with your competitors and hope your drops aren't as big your competitors and your increases are larger than your competitors, thats the only way you can really judge DA.
-
Probably lost some links? Some might have dropped based on the latest returns for Moz's database.
I didn't see much changes from what Im monitoring. It's normal to see this changing and bouncing a few points up and down.
-
Domain Authority is a signal by Moz.com and it works similar to Google Page Rank the only difference is that Google PR updates without a given date and DA updates after every month. In the last updated I have seen the drop of 3 numbers down from 40 to 37 so this happens from time to time and there is no problem with it.
For more information regarding this I am sure anyone from the Moz staff can help you with that.
Hope this helps!
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
-
How many times will Google read a page?
Hello! Do you know if Google reads a page more than once? We want to include a very robust menu that has a lot of links, so we were thinking about coding a very simple page that loads first and immediately loading the other code that has all the links thinking that perhaps Google will only read the first version but won't read it the second time with all the links. Do you know if we will get penalized? I'm not sure if I got the idea across, let me know if I need to expand more. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alinaalvarez0 -
What to do when your home page an index for a series of pages.
I have created an index stack. My home page is http://www.southernwhitewater.com The home page is the index itself and the 1st page http://www.southernwhitewater.com/nz-adventure-tours-whitewater-river-rafting-hunting-fishing My home page (if your look at it through moz bat for chrome bar} incorporates all the pages in the index. Is this Bad? I would prefer to index each page separately. As per my site index in the footer What is the best way to optimize all these pages individually and still have the customers arrive at the top to a picture. rel= canonical? Any help would be great!! http://www.southernwhitewater.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VelocityWebsites0 -
Swapping page keyword?
If we have swopped the keyword (leaflet printing) from this page http://www.fastprint.co.uk/leaflet-flyer-printing/ and moved it to http://www.fastprint.co.uk/ But the inner page is still ranking for the keyword is there a way to tell Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
How many pages should be on landscapers website
Hi Guys, We have a good website strong onsite and offsite seo. A year ago, we had a 15 pages website for all main keywords we needed and we were on top 3 for most of these keywords in google. We were happy but we wanted more.. So we created lots of unique content targeting long tail keywords and created 100 more pages for the website. In next 4-5 months we lost positions for almost all our main keywords but got lots of longtails SERPs. Trafiic grew but the quality and the conversion rate shrinked. Everybody keep saying that it doesn't matter how many pages you have on the website as long as content is unique and I don't think it is true. I see lots of 3-5 paged websites without any seo in top 3 results in google. Does it mean that if I delete all these 100 pages that I created I will have more chances to get my main keywords SERP back? Basically does the seo juice that you have on domain is spreading across all pages and the more pages you have the less juice every page will get?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vadimmarusin100 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
How do you transition a keyword rank from a home page to a sub-page on the site?
We're currently ranking #1 for a valuable keyword, but the result on the SERP is our home page. We're creating a new product page focused on this keyword to provide a better user experience and create more relevant content. What is the best way to make a smooth transition to make the product page rank #1 for the keyword instead of the home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | buildasign0 -
Google Filter? Drop from top first page to bottom second page?
My site has dropped from the first page top spots to the bottom second page, about 2 month ago. From time to time it reappears in the first page, is this some kind of google filter? How do I solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ofer230 -
Why did my rankings drop?
Hi all, In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links. Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen: 1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see. Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites. 3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too. A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3. I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse. Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net. Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0