Why is my domain authority so low?

[ganapro]

Hello, a couple of years ago I started publishing on my site more than 10 posts a day of content that no one else had. For this reason, my competitors started paraphrasing my content without giving proper attribution, and they ranked better in Google.

That's why I realized that apart from creating content I had to work on my SEO, so I started to get some backlinks, most of them via contests on blogs. I am getting about 1 high quality link from PR2, PR3 or PR4 blogs each week. According to Open Site Explorer, I have 20 root domain links (200 total links). In reality I have more backlinks but they don't show up (they do show up in Ahrefs, about 50 root domains). To my surprise, I only have 15 Domain Authority.

This is the most evident example, take a look at this screenshot: http://imgur.com/dFk2rkx

My website is on the far left, two of my competitors on the right. As you can see I win every category except total links and the most important, domain authority. Are total links that important for Domain authority, even if 99% are internal? By the way, I also have more posts than these guys, I don't know why the report says otherwise. Why is the site on the right ranking so high?

The same thing happens with the rest of my competitors, they have a lot of low quality links from "lists of domain sites" and in general a lot of very spammy links.

According to what I have been reading, my good quality links should be more helpful than my competitors'  spammy links, which should in fact affect them. So what is going on? I have no idea if I'm doing things right. Why is my domain authority so low? Thanks for your help.

dFk2rkx

[94501]

That is frustrating. At the same time, it sounds like you're doing alot of right things.

Here are a few questions for you:

How long has it been at D/A 15?

What's your home page authority and how does that compare to these competitors?

How are the actual search results going in terms of, for instance, traffic to your site?

Just a note that Moz's tools, as good as they are, are not synonymous with how Google sees it.

Best... Mike

[ganapro]

Hello, thank you for your answer.

I signed up for a Moz pro account less than a week ago, so I don't really know how long it's been like this.

My home page authority is marginally better compared tho these two sites, here is a screenshot: http://imgur.com/jd6pwzj

I am not ranking better than my main competitors on Google, I have searched for articles and most of my competitors usually rank better. Since I update my site a lot I am still getting around 5K uniques a day, but I know it could be much better.

Any suggestions? Thank you so much for your help.

jd6pwzj

[94501]

If those comparisons are your main competitors and if they consistently/clearly outrank you, then I don't think the problem is in the numbers OSE shows. It could be alot of other things, including but not limted to internal linking, or CTR in SERPs (title tags) or user signals like bounce rate, or duplicate content or depth of content or site speed or downtime or a combination of those things and others.

On what you show in those comparisons and what you say about the quality of the back links etc, I would choose your link profile over theirs.

Consider making a spreadsheet of pages/terms where you are clearly beaten by these sites. Then, list across the top all of the different ranking factors you can think of. Then, fill in the info for your pages and your competitors and look for patterns.  That's what I would do.

I hope that helps a little. Best... Mike

[ganapro]

Thanks again for your reply, I'll try your suggestion, I suspect internal linking might be the culprit. My site is fast, less than 2 seconds in pingdom tools, I am even using a CDN. Bounce rate has been a solid 42% the whole year.

But still, my question still stands, how come my domain authority appears so low in OSE compared to those other sites? To be honest it doesn't make any sense when you see the numbers...

[94501]

Feel free to inmail me your url and I'll look at it more closely.

Best... Mike