My Domain rank is falling but my traffic is improving?

[Banknotes]

I have been here for one month today and have been reworking many pages to improve my On-Page results for my site www.antiquebanknotes.com

I have seen some really nice improvement in my organic, search and non paid keywords.  (up 38%, 21% and 29% this week)

But last week all of a sudden my domain authority dropped from 10 to 9.   Not tragic but still odd since I have been getting some decent results from my optimazations.   My competitors have domain authority in the 20's so it's something I am sure I need to work on.

I have added links out to relevant sites and added lots of content but my domain authority falls?   Is this common when a site makes lots of changes?

[RobMay]

Hi Greg,

This might currently be affected by any back-links you have either established (been building to the domain) or one's that have freely linked to you.

My advise, would be to continue just working to improve your site. Metrics for performance will increase over time, if you keep your 'visitors, and clients' in mind. Improve the user experience, take care of the proper technical steps to ensure proper use of 301's, on and off page optimizations, great content and user experience and over time, your metrics will show themselves off which is always nice..

Just remember, all this work isn't something that will happen overnight. It takes time to improve these rankings. As Moz's index is usually updated 1 time per month (if they are running on time), you will be able to track this metric month over month. If you see steady drops, then you might want to start digging.

Again, my guess is that you are on the right track. Don't overthink the metrics behind the site. Look at the analytics data and think, how can I better my site for improved user experience

Cheers, Rob

[RobertFisher]

Actually, there were recent adjustments to the SEOmoz page rank system to make it more reflective of where a page would actually be ranking in search results. Since the move was only ten percent, it was probably simply an adjustment based on that change. The change was explained in the following post on the 23rd of Nov. by Matt Peters

Since you are seeing improvement, it shows that the change is based no changes in measurement by moz and not in search rankings or results.

Rest easy, its all good.