DAs dropped for many pages?

[FCRMediaLietuva]

I recently noticed that the domain authorities dropped by 5 or 6 points for us and for our competitors. And for many other pages that I check regularly. Was the algorithm changed or is it just me?

[MoosaHemani]

Domain Authority is a signal by Moz.com and it works similar to Google Page Rank the only difference is that Google PR updates without a given date and DA updates after every month. In the last updated I have seen the drop of 3 numbers down from 40 to 37 so this happens from time to time and there is no problem with it.

For more information regarding this I am sure anyone from the Moz staff can help you with that.

Hope this helps!

[DennisSeymour]

Probably lost some links? Some might have dropped based on the latest returns for Moz's database.

I didn't see much changes from what Im monitoring. It's normal to see this changing and bouncing a few points up and down.

[Andy-Halliday]

Its not to do with losing links, its a score out of 100, so a drop isn't always a bad signal. Because the score is out of 100, you can't keep on increasing indefinitely.

Its probably Moz has crawled further and deeper and has a a refresh of data as it now knows more.

You have to compare your score with your competitors and hope your drops aren't as big your competitors and your increases are larger than your competitors, thats the only way you can really judge DA.

[Shakur]

Hi there,

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 189 billion URLs. That's an amazing number. Their next crawl could theoretically cover 238 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 179 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.

Hope it helps you

[Cyrus-Shepard]

These other folks left some fantastic responses, so I'll only add that DA is a relativistic number generated each update. It's best use case is to compare yourself to other sites, so if both you and your competitor dropped a similar amount, that's actually not a bad thing.