Help! My Domain Authority keeps dropping! What do I do?

[KristyO]

Hey!

I just noticed my Domain Authority keeps dropping? What's happening? What do I do to get it better. I'm scared and dont know the next move to make to get this site better. Help please!

Thanks!

http://www.moondoggieinc.com

Kristy O

[mrdavidingram]

Hi Kristy,

The first thing to say is that Domain Authority is a third party metric, so unless you have seen a drop in your traffic then there should be no need for immediate alarm. Although DA correlates with successful rankings, there is still no guarantee that a change in DA will effect your rankings in any way.

The solution for your issue might be quite simple. In last months update the number of links in the index was around 50% smaller than the previous update. This meant that a lot of links that where contributing towards your DA score are no longer in SeoMoz's index, and can therefore not contribute towards your DA score.

In no way does this mean that these links are no longer in Google, as the Google index and the Mozscape index are two entirely separate entities and are in no way connected.

After this month's update, it has been noted that the index is even smaller than last month (albeit by a much smaller margin). If you read the Q&A entries following last month’s update you'll see lots of people asking the same question, and it was confirmed that the drop in DA was due to the smaller index.

I expect we'll see the same over the next week.

Personally, I saw my clients DA drop by an average of 3-4 points.

If your drop in score correlates with this pattern, then you have nothing to worry about at all. Especially if your traffic hasn't been effected.

Here are the details of the smaller update from last month:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/july-mozscape-update

And here are this month’s details:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/august-mozscape-update

If your drop in score doesn't coincide with this, then it most likely means that you've lost one/some links that were contributing to your overall Domain Authority score. You can get to the bottom of this by using the historical link date in Majestic to figure out what links where lost, and when.

If this is the case then you can either try and rebuild the lost links, or create some new ones. Or ideally, both!

Best of luck.

David

[CodyWheeler]

First - stay calm. Is your traffic noticeably dropping? Have you been penalized in any way in the SERPs? If not, you might just be experiencing regular fluctuations and have nothing to worry about. Look at that first.

Next, I'm assuming you have a Pro campaign set up.

The first course of action there would be to analyze your warnings, errors and notifications to minimize those. Fix the low-hanging fruit there and move on. Next, make sure you're following proper on-page SEO architecture throughout your site. Proper titles, H1s, interlinking, hierarchy, sitemapping, etc.

Now analyze your link profile. Do you have a lot of low quality links? If so, you may need to do some cleanup.

Additionally, you're in an e-commerce sector, so you may also want to check out the most recent Pro webinar - http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues

There are a number of things that can contribute to this. Without more information, all I can tell you is to start with the basics and move up. Have you made any significant changes lately?

[fenwaymedia]

Hi Kristy,

The first thing I would do would use the tool here called Open Site Explorer and or use link:yourdomain.com to check all the sites linking to your site. loosing domain authority could be for a number of different issues but one could be some bad or non relevant links linking to your site. I would also use Google webmaster tools just to check the general health of your site and request a SEOmoz Crawl of your site. All of this data combined will give you a good starting point to what might be going wrong. I see you have a google page rank of 2 at the moment, what was it before?

Hope this helps.

Kindest Regards,

Craig

[gtrotter666]

I'm not sure you really have any sort of problem at all.  Unless you have seen a fall in traffic/ranking etc then I wouldn't worry.  DA calculations seem to lag what Google is doing anyway, so if you have not suffered in terms of traffic/ranking then I wouldn't worry at all.

DA is just an indicative metric about your domain, the end goal is conversions, so worry about it if those are hit but otherwise - stay calm and carry on (I should get that on a T-Shirt or something!)

Gary

[KristyO]

Thank you!

[mrdavidingram]

You're welcome Kristy, I'll have my fingers crossed that you see a nice jump up next month

Anything I can ever help with just give me a shout on here, or tweet me @mrdavidingram

David

[KristyO]

Yes, I was on the webinar too Lots of helpful info, wish I could implement all of it.

Thank you for your help! I've been changing parts of the site a lot lately... I completely redesigned the site from asp to php this past may, and have taken it completely over since. So I'm really trying to figure out what's lingering from before and what I can do to make it better. I'm just starting in the SEO world, from a designer background

[mrdavidingram]

That's how I got started many moons ago.

[KristyO]

Thanks!

Ya, it's been 2 since I got the site in May.

I'll be starting to go over the Open Site Explorer stuff now. I have a feeling stuff that was done before is showing up for me now.

Thanks again!

[KristyO]

Haha many moons?

I dig the SEO stuff so far, gonna stay with it for sure. But my home still lies in Adobe Suite I think.

[CodyWheeler]

If you're just getting started, I'd recommend the Beginner's Guide - http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Also - You'll want to make sure you've 301 redirected all of your pre-existing .asp URLs to your new .php URLs. You'll lose all of your incoming links with the URL changes unless you are using an extensionless structure.