Domain Authority Drops

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

Is anyone else seeing a drop in DA across the board ? Has Moz changed the criteria/scoring method ?.

I have a client/project that naturally achieved some great links from high authority sites on contextual pages yet the DA has dropped by 2 points in the month or two since, when i would expect it to have gone up or at least stayed the same.

In addition the link profile has otherwise improved with an increase in subnets, ips, links, domains etc etc so combined with above would certainly expect a rise in  DA

Anyone else experiences similar or someone from Moz can confirm if scoring method changed or possibly not yet discovered these links ?

All Best

Dan

[KeriMorgret]

Yes, the DA did drop by about two points beyond normal for this last index, and should be fixed in the next index.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Ok great thanks for the update,

As a suggestion it would be good to have that kind of info as a 'newsflash' or mentioned prominently somewhere so we know its happened rather than spending ages analysing backlink profile for drop in other metrics trying to find causes of the overall DA drop.  Apologies if such an area exists and i just havnt seen it yet (such as a service status update area etc)

Specifically though any ideas why a site that has earn't some really high quality/authority links over november/december authority not have increased its DA. Is it that those links are likely not being factored in yet ? (i thought that they would be since so high authority and hence easily identified)

Thanks
Dan

[anthonydnelson]

Hi Dan,

DA is a fantastic metric to compare domain strength and judge their overall backlink profile and ability to rank. However, it is not a good metric to Trend to show domain improvement. Simply put, the metric data set is different with every Linkscape update.

If you go to the Open Site Explorer homepage, you will see that the recent crawl contains 104 billion URLs. That's an amazing number. Their next crawl could theoretically cover 107 billion URLs. You may have hundreds of additional backlinks found in those extra 3 billion pages crawled. Your DA goes up, despite you doing nothing to the website. Most likely, your competitors DA goes up as well.

The next update may only crawl 103 billion URLs. It doesn't crawl 100s of pages with your links. Your DA goes down. So do your competitors.

Simply put, it is a sample size of backlinks. It is great for comparing one domain to another, due to the data being based off of the same sample size. It's great for competitor insights and analysis.

When your DA goes down, that doesn't necessarily mean your site is less authoritative. If you still have links pointing to your website, you don't lose that equity because Moz had a smaller crawl. Remember, DA is a marketing metric, but not a Google ranking factor.

[Gordon_Hall]

Glad you brought it up - I was getting a little worried!

[maestrosonrisas]

Thanks for the question Dan Lawrence and for the answers Keri Morgret. My web domain authority dropped beyond normal 5 points, i did not done any links or lost any so it was very strange.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks for that very interesting info Anthony !

I never had it down as a ranking factor but have been showing to clients as a trending metric to show improvement against competitors, which i feel i can still do so long as in comparison to competitors rather than looking at the number by itself ?

All Best

Dan

[DonnaDuncan]

Danarchism raises a good point. Is there a place where crawl impacts are noted? Given the respect that your metric has earned and the number of questions it raises when there are unexpected fluctuations, it would be really helpful if Moz shared their observations.

Also wondering (like Danarchism) if that's already available and I too have missed it. If that's the case, please share.

Lastly, was this a one-time anomoly that's now fixed?