Falling Domain Authority

[Dekoda_Jones]

What are the factors that would cause my domain authority to fall?  As best I understand it, we would have to be losing links.  For example, one of my clients started with a DA around 60 and now 4 months on it is sitting around 47.

This has happened with a couple clients and I'm not really sure why or how to counteract it.

[AU-SEO]

Joshua,

I would certainly look into where your link building strategies built your links into. There is a possibility that your site has placed inbound links on a spam site or a network that was hit. Other items may include quality level of content. If you are not using original authoritative content you could see a shit. One initial question is how has this impacted rankings for your primary keyword sets?

Revisit any work over the last 4 months you have done, you may have done some dev work that is negatively impacting you? What is your Google Webmasters Account saying? Has your page load time slowed down? Have you changed server environments? There are certainly a number of possibilities. If several of our clients are experiencing the same thing and you are hosting then look at the hosting level. If you are in a shared hosting environment then a spam site on the same server could impact you.

-Phil G

[SparkplugDigital]

I think that another factor that could reduce domain authority is if you add a significant number of additional pages to your site without earning a proportional number of new inbound links. This would dilute the authority across the domain.

[AU-SEO]

Good add!

[Thommas]

According to SEOmoz there are over 150 signals included in DA calculation. Of course links would be your usual suspect here but as Phil Gross said you should revisit all the changes you've made in the past months.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

This is a common perception, but this applies more to Page Authority than Domain Authority.

Each domain has one DA score, which applies to the entire site. Domain Authority is the "grandaddy" metric that takes all the other metrics into consideration, including Page Authority and MozTrust.

Page Authority, on the other hand, flows between individual pages. So in this situation, a large number of new pages without new links will most likely have low Page Authority, but the DA for the site as a whole remains the same.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Joshua,

You are essentially correct, but it could be a number of factors. Off the top of my head, and this is by no means a complete list of possibilities, the reasons for a loss of DA could be caused by:

1. As you stated, losing links. It's estimated that each year over 50% of the entire web "disappears". Most of this is junk, but it happens to good links as well
2. For one reason or another, Linkscape didn't find certain links during it's last crawl of the web. They may reappear during the next update.
3. The sites linking to you lost Domain Authority themselves. This would effect your score
4. Natural changes in Linkscape from update to update. SEOmoz is constantly improving how it crawls the web (and sometimes there's some rough spot around the edges) which causes natural fluctuation in link metrics. When this happens, it's best to use DA not as a historical measure of your own site, but as a competitive measure against your competitors. If your DA fell, it's possible your competitors DA fell as well and you are just as strong.

More than likely, it's a combination of several factors. Usually, it's nothing to worry about unless you see it correspond to a traffic drop as well. Hopefully your DA will be back up during the next update.