Why Did Domain Authority On Our 2 Sites Drop 10 Points?

[AWCthreads]

Greetings,

I am new to the community and am checking out Pro. The domain authority for two of our sites www.lumber2.com and www.americasworkclothes.com has dropped 10 points each respectively.

I've worked on getting our lumber 2 site on registries from getlisted.org (i think there are 5 or 6 of them).

Our page authority has improved significantly along with mosrank and moztrust. However, at the same time our domain authorities just tanked 10 points each. Since each site dropped 10 points, I'm wondering if its the ros links affecting them. Here's the domain data:

Lumber 2 site: DA 21: 50,489 links from 12 domains
America's Work Clothes: DA 20: 33,839 links from 5 domains

We have left nav run of site links between our two sites and have had them in place for a couple of years with steady domain authority progression. Suddenly DA tanked. Is there a chance there is too much run of site linking? I already removed a few links, so you won't see all of them.

Can anyone help?

Thank you. Steve

[eTundra]

Hi Steve,

SEOMoz just updated their PA & DA metrics - you can read more about it here.

The main takeaway is that in this crawl of the web SEOMoz focused more on getting a broader range of domains rather than crawling deeper pages on bigger sites.  If you lost DA then that probably means you had quite a few deep links that did not get crawled and not as much domain diversity among smaller sites.

The main thing to always remember is that DA is for reference only.  It is not meant to be a key performance indicator for your site!  DA will continue to fluctuate up and down as SEOMoz improves their index of the web and continues to tweak the priorities of each crawl.

Yes, DA is highly correlated to higher rankings, but it's still a very high-level view of a site.  If you're trying to get a feel for a random site at a glance, then DA & PA are great.  If you're trying to figure out what your site is doing well and where it needs improvement, then you need to dig much, much deeper.

What keywords are driving traffic to your site?  How well are you converting that traffic?  What closely related keywords to your main ones could you rank better for?  What 3, 4, and 5 word variations of those keywords do you rank for or could you rank for?  These are the questions that are going to lead to positive actions, not 10 point fluctuations in your DA.

[AWCthreads]

Hi Back Burner,

Thank you for the feedback. Excellent! I have a couple of questions. I understand the deep links that did not get crawled, but what do you mean when speaking of "not as much domain diversity among smaller sites?"

Also, do you think the disparity between linking domains and the number of links is affecting the rank?

Unfortunately, our page 1 competition typically have a minimum DA rank of 30 points at a minimum, so using this barometer suggests I'm not doing something well at the domain level correct?

Thanks again for the help! I need it!

[eTundra]

First, I should reiterate that I am only hypothesizing about why your DA went down.  There are many, many factors that go into DA - what I talked about above is what I consider to be the most likely explanation without having really looked at your sites.

What I meant by "not as much domain diversity among smaller sites" is that you don't have enough links from unique root domains.  Open Site Explorer shows that you have some 1,400 links from only 6 domains for one site and 1,400 links from 3 domains for the other.

You have a good amount of total links, but in the eyes of Google you have only convinced 9 other sites that your two websites are worthy enough to receive an editorial vote.  Domain diversity is certainly a very important (although still only one of hundreds) ranking factor for Google.

Much, much more importantly - what are the keywords that lead to a purchase on your website?  Which ones get a lot of traffic that you would like to rank better for?  You need to work backwards from the keywords that are driving the best qualified (i.e. most likely to convert) traffic to your site and then build a linking/SEO strategy from there.

[AWCthreads]

Thanks again Back Burner. Have a great holiday season!