Domain authority drop

[ParisChildress]

Hi SEOmoz gurus,

The last 2 months I am seeing a drop in the Domain authority for some of my clients.

• Some of them are old sites.
• Some are new (less than 6 months old)

For the old sites I thought the reason for the drop might be caused by discounting the value of low quality backlinks.

But this cannot be the case for the new sites - they have high quality backlinks from newspapers and I can't make any sense of the drop.

Has anyone else experienced the same issue?

Might this be caused by a change in SEOmoz algorithm?

Thanks!

[KyleJack]

Hello,

This can happen for many reasons. But going off the information you have provided you may want to check the links your newer sites have from newspapers as some UK publications have been hit recently by a Google penalty: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/interflora-what-really-happened.html

Before you get carried away though, check your verticals and compare your sites with their competitors to see if they have experienced any changes.

[ParisChildress]

Hi Kyle,

Thanks for your reply.

I cannot check historical data for the DA for my competitors and since I am not keeping track of them, I cannot tell if they've dropped or not.

I was wondering if someone from the SEOmoz core team can enlighten us about an algorithm change..

[Dr-Pete]

When you say "drop", what kind of movement are we talking about? Could you give a before/after example without naming the site?

The DA/PA algorithm is based on machine learning, so even if the link-graph remained static, it is recalibrated from time to time. Of course, on top of that, the link-graph never stays static. If you're talking about something like 62->60, it probably wouldn't mean much at all. If you're talking about 60->40 and consistently large-scale drops, that would more likely indicate problems with your link-building strategy across all of the sites.