Seeing steady drop in Domain Authority?

[Becky_Converge]

Hi!

I'm working with a client that has seen a steady drop in their domain authority over the past year and a half. They were at 75 in October '13 and now they're down to 67. The drop seems rather steady over this time, no big dip.

They've actually worked their crawl errors during this time and have reduced a ton of them. I can't figure out why this metric would be dropping. Anyone know of something measurable I can look at to help pinpoint the problem (and of course actions to fix it)?

Thanks so much!
Becky

[Dezzign]

Hi Becky, The domain authority is dropping because the site is either losing inbound links or the sites linking to your site are losing their domain authority. Crawl errors will have nothing to do with the issue because Moz is crawling the sites that link to you to calculate your DA.

If you run the site through ahrefs I'm sure you'll see a gradual decline in your site's overall inbound links.

Remember there are two types of Domain Authority (DA). There is good DA and bad DA. The Moz DA algorithm has difficulty defining the wheat from the chaff. Spammy links can contribute to your DA. In a recent test, I was able to take a brand new domain name to a DA72 in less than 50 days. But that domain is now useless, and it's DA of 72, and Page Authority of 68 aren't true representations of the quality of that domain.

There could be many scenarios where your DA goes down, but your rankings go up. This could occur if you were removing all of your bad links manually. Your DA would go down, but your ranking might actually go up in some scenarios.

High DA only correlates to high rankings when the link profile contributing to the high DA is clean, (well most of the time). There could also be crawl errors on the sites linking back to you, and this would cause a drop in your site's DA too. The only way to raise your site's DA is with new links. If your site naturally gains links over time, then your DA will remain stable and possibly continue to grow. If there's no influx of new links, then chances are that you'll naturally lose some of the old links you've previously had causing your DA to drop gradually.

[Andy-Halliday]

As DA has a limit of 100, drops aren't always a bad indication and should really be compared against competition. Lets say the competition has dropped from 76 to 61, then in theory you have gained by 7.

Richard is also correct, but you can only really measure DA in comparison as their is a ceiling of 100 - so you can't always keep on improving.

I would start to the DA against the competitors and report that way - rather than just showing how they have dropped.

[Becky_Converge]

Thanks Andy and Richard!

That all makes sense and is helpful to think about the 100 cap.

Their competition actually has gone down a little bit over that time, but only a point or two vs. our larger drop. Could that be interpreted as they're gaining links and we are not?

Tactics for improving this number are all focused on link building?

Thanks!

Becky

[Dezzign]

Hello Becky, Yes it could be interpreted as their gaining links and your not. But it could also be interpreted as the sites their backlinks are on are gaining links, and the sites your backlinks are on are losing links.

If your backlink is on my site and my site's DA goes up by 30 points, then your site's DA will also go up by a certain number of points. Your DA increase would be dependent on where your backlink is on my site. If your backlink was on my homepage, then I'd say your DA would probably go up by about 4 points.

And yes Becky, the only way to increase DA is via inbound links. But I would also try to move my clients focus away from this metric as it's not that relevant to traffic or rankings. In many niches, I see sites with lower DA dominating the rankings and getting more traffic.