Big drop in Domain Authority on 17 Nov 2015
-
Hello,
My domain authority dropped on 17 Nov 2015
Domain name is: http://www.proprofs.com/ drop from 74 to 68
Also on another domain : http://www.marriage.com/. Drop from 38 to 34.
Very much surprised by this big drop?
Would appreciate everyone's feedback?
Thanks
-
Hi there.
It's not me suggesting it, it's Rand Fishkin (founder of MOZ) saying it - check the link I refer to in my answer. Second paragraph. (It's quoted in my answer as well)
-
Can anyone at moz confirm this?
Our site and its competitors all dropped in DA. Ours went from 57 to 48, which is no small change.
I can't really let this drop without a proper explanation, if it is as Dimitri suggested a recalibrating of the scale from 0-100 then someone from Moz should confirm this.
-
Hi, Greg.
I still think that the explanation roots in the relativity idea I have quoted above. Also I linked to original post by Rand, so, check it out - you might find all the answers
-
I saw a similar effect across campaigns. 9 out of 10 dropped, just last week. Whenever I see that across a number of campaigns, I assume it is one of two things:
-
A simple algorithm tweak for the DA calculation.
-
Google is tuning their main algorithm, it caused real DA impact to sites, and creates a cascading effect across the DA ranks.
The last time I saw this effect was late april early may of this year, right as google was starting to push out the update that they eventually rolled back. A few months later, I saw the DA ranks all go up to where they were before, again, across 9 campaigns.
I guess the question is, is Google moving again? Or is Moz simply tuning?
Thanks,
Greg
-
-
Thanks for a great explanation,
Checking competitors trends was a great addition. We saw a drop in DA and I was at first concerned,but then noticed the same in competitors. Thanks Dmitrii
-
Hi there.
Please refer to this topic by Rand: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores
Read #2:
You've earned more links, but the highest authority sites have grown their link profile even more
Since Domain and Page Authority are on a 100-page scale, the very top of that represents the most link-rich sites and pages, and nearly every index, it's harder and harder to get these high scores and sites, on average, that aren't growing their link profiles substantively will see PA/DA drops. This is because of the scaling process - if Facebook.com (currently with a DA of 100) grows its link profile massively, that becomes the new DA 100, and it will be harder for other sites that aren't growing quality links as fast to get from 99 to 100 or even from 89 to 90. This is true across the scale of DA/PA, and makes it critical to measure a site's DA and a page's PA against the competition, not just trended against itself. You could earn loads of great links, and still see a DA drop due to these scaling types of features. Always compare against similar sites and pages to get the best sense of relative performance, since DA/PA are relative, not absolute scores.Basically, DA/PA is relative metric, it's relative to 100 DA websites, so, if let's say facebook got +million links, and you got only +10, then relatively to FB your website DA will drop. That's why so many websites' DAs have dropped after last crawl.
To see how good/bad your DA changed, compare to your competitors.
Hope this helps.
-
HI Sameer
I wouldnt worry too much since i think this is much more to do with MOz recent Index update.
If i look at my 'Manage Campaigns' page where i see a list of all my campaigns currently running (10 campaigns), 9 out of the 10 DA has dropped by a similar percentage.
Hence this IMO is a Moz crawl drop in DA rather than real world drop in site authority
Would be good to get a response from a Mozzer too just to confirm ??
All Best
Dan
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
-
Someone has purchased super similar domain to mine will this effect my site seo overall?
I have a domain name allready registered www.untamedelopement.co.uk and dot com. Someone despite knowing I had this name has registered untamedelopements.com (with the s) is that going to mess up my seo. I'm UK and will be targeting as my keyword Scottish Wedding Photographer and they are Canada? Thanks in advance
Moz Pro | | hemeravisuals130 -
Massive Drop in Rankings
Hello, My site (www.reynoldsdesignstudio.com) has recently dropped off the map (50+ places) for almost every phrase I was ranking between 3 and 6 on the first page. My main phrases on google were "web design rochester mn", "web development rochester mn" I have been setting up a new web server but have not pointed this domain at that server yet so it shouldn't be anything related there. I also have not updated the site in a couple years (I know that's bad), so it doesn't appear to be a hacking issue either. I was 'hacked' a few years back where I gained a TON of crappy links from China and what-not but it never appeared to affect anything. I'm not sure if that is what is causing the recent drop in rankings. If anyone has any ideas on what could have caused the issue that would be great. According to my GA traffic I had a spike earlier in the month and then it has steadily dropped off. This is consistent with my actual page rankings. Thanks OAsjcHw
Moz Pro | | reynoldsdesign0 -
Drop in domain authority for myself and all my competitors, was something changed?
On the 1/11 report all four websites dropped, and starting on 2/12 they all dropped a few more times. These are all large companies who are completely white hat. Was something changed? The reason I asked is all of our linking C-Blocks dropped as well. Mine dropped from 114 to 42 and I have no idea why. All of my competitors dropped as well, is this related?
Moz Pro | | EcommerceSite1 -
Does linking to relevant high authority websites effect your MozTrust or Rank?
Basically what the title says. I am having a hard time understanding why a compeitor with less linking domains and none of any real quality, they're all membership sites or partnerships, nothing to relevant to the industry. While we have links and articles on us from multiple magazines in our industry. As well as to relevant directories with high domain ranks. The only thing I noticed is they're linking to their clients website, which are all high authority websites. So do external links count towards your MozTrust or Rank?
Moz Pro | | SeanConroy1 -
OSE Domains & Subdomains
Is there a compelling reason that OSE treats subdomains as part of a parent domain, rather than as a separate site? Or is this just a technical limitation? I ask because it's my understanding that Google treats subdomains more like separate domains than like parts of the parent domain. OSE treating them more like folders creates some frustrating situations when researching niches that are heavily filled with blospot and wordpress.com blogs. First of all, the domain authority in these situations is not at all indicative of the strength of the site. It also makes it hard to evaluate linking root domains at a glance, since all blogspot blogs count as one domain. So to see all blogspot sites linking you have to go to the full link list -- where each site may be listed hundreds of times -- and you can't group them because they're all considered the same domain. To be sure you when researching these niches you can just throw out domain authority as a metric, and export every report to excel where you can sort things in a way to make it easier to separate sites. But if there isn't a compelling SEO reason to have OSE function this way, I'd love to see those subdomains treated as separate sites so I can have access to all the easy to use SEOmoz metrics and layouts without the extra work. And of course if there is a compelling SEO reason for subdomains to be treated as domains, I'd love to be educated! : )
Moz Pro | | Ecreativeworks0 -
Greater Number of Linking Domains in Anchor Text Excel Export?
I exported the anchor text for a domain from Opensite Explorer and when I sum the "Number of Linking Root Domains Containing Anchor Text" it is higher than the total amount of linking root domains for the site. Is this because some domains use multiple anchor text links, so it is counted more than once in the exported spreadsheet?
Moz Pro | | ProjectLabs0 -
Links & page authority crawl
I see the links and page authority have not been updated in over a month... does anyone know how often it gets updated?
Moz Pro | | nazmiyal0 -
How best to gain Followed Linking Root Domains?
Hi All, Sorry if this question has been asked before. I've had a look through the Q&A sections and I couldn't really see anyone who'd asked the question as direct as this? Basically, I'm using the SEOMoz competitive domain analysis to compare some of our domains and our competitors domains and see where we're falling down. At the minute, we seem to be only scoring around '31', whereas our two closest competitors as 32 and 33 on the overall score. This still seems pretty low to me (maybe it's not) so I'm assuming we can make some good headway. At the minute, the analysis shows that we're beating our competitors hands down with the number of links to our site, these are all relatively good quality and they haven't just been spammed out there to gain links. We are however struggling to get followed linking root domains. As I understand it, these are basically just links from domains not on the same IP that are followed? Since I've seen this, I've looked through the open site explorer and gone through all of our competitors sites to get backlinks from URL's linking to them. I've had fairly good success with this but they only seem to have gone up by 1 - 2 links. Does this only get updated once a month? In addition to this, does anyone have any tips on how to build up followed linking domains? Kind Regards
Moz Pro | | LewisSellers
Lewis0