Domain authority get down significantly. Internal MOZ Issue? Google Algoritm Update?

[NachoRetta]

I've noticed that several websites have lost DA since middle of october. I attached a picture. Could be this a MOZ internal issue like happened a time ago? Not only the DA get down, I have lost C-blocks links, too
I check in http://health.moz.com/ and found this Crawl Services Outage: http://health.moz.com/incidents/fbn00m7xxzx2
But not appear to have direct relation with my question.
Or may be a google algoritm update?

3anVE5J.png

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Please read this pinned post by Rand (point #2): https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

As you can see several domains DAs are going down at the same time, meaning that DA change is relative due to highest DA domains gaining lots more links.

[NachoRetta]

Hi, thank you for answer. I read that article but i dont understand yet why all the domains that i show on the picture went down their DA. I think that is not due to highest DA domains gaining lots more links, it could be for one, not for all..

[DmitriiK]

Hi. Exact opposite, my friend. When highest DA domains get a lot more links, it affects every other domain (unless your domains are 100DA). Basically, what you need to look at is relative change of tracked domains' DA to each other. If your domain went down 2 points and your competitor's went down 5 points - good for you. if opposite - not so good for you

I understand that it's quite confusing and i i don't really understand why MOZ sticks to relative DA scoring, but that's what we have to work with.

Hope this helps.

[NachoRetta]

ok, i understand. When you say "your competitor" DA went down you want to say the specific competence for each market niche or to all the urls on the internet. I.e., MOZ compare the DA with all the internet urls or his algoritm detect some kind of topic to determine the domain autorithy?

[DmitriiK]

I'm not sure if I understand your question correctly - correct me if i'm wrong.

Well, when i say competitor, i mean your competitor. MOZ doesn't have any topical relevance algorithms in calculating DA (as far as I know and understand). So, they do crawl all links (or as much as they can) on the Internet.

Now, as why you need to look at your competitor relative changes. Basically, as Rand said here:

My strongest suggestion if you ever have the concern/question "Why did my PA/DA drop?!" is to always compare against a set of competing sites/pages. If most of your competitors fell as well, it's more likely related to relative scaling or crawl biasing issues, not to anything you've done. Remember that DA/PA are relative metrics, not absolute! That means you can be improving links and rankings and STILL see a falling DA score, but, due to how DA is scaled, the score in aggregate may be better predictive of Google's rankings.

If 100 DA websites got more links, then all other websites' DAs will drop proportinally. Therefore, if your website's DA dropped even more, something is wrong with your backlink profile.

It's quite weird, I know. I'm not sure if I can explain any better. Hope this helps.

P.S. I'll send this post link to Rand, maybe he can clarify more.

[randfish]

Hi Dmitri and Juan - perhaps this way of explaining it will help:

A good analogy might be how rankings work for countries in various categories. For example, if Japan is ranked as having the world's best healthcare in 2015, and they improve the quality of their healthcare in 2016, are they guaranteed to still be #1?

Not necessarily.

Maybe the #2 ranked country improved even more and now Japan has fallen from #1 to #2 despite actually improving on their healthcare quality. Maybe countries 2-10 all improved dramatically and Japan's now fallen to #11 even though they technically got better, not worse.

PA and DA work in a similar fashion. Since they're scaled on a 100-point system, after each update, the recalculations mean that PA/DA for a given page/site could go down even if that page/site has improved their link quantity and quality. Such is the nature of a relative, scaled system. This is why I encourage folks strongly to watch not just PA/DA for their own pages/sites, but for a variety of competitors and sites in similar niches to see whether you're losing or gaining ground broadly in your field.

The score system has to be relative (we can't use absolutes or we wouldn't be able to have good correlations against Google - we'd just have another system that counts links or counts linking domains or the like). If PA/DA aren't working well for you as metrics, I'd encourage you to use something else - link counts or counts of linking domains/IPs or the like. The purpose of the DA/PA metrics is to track against Google, and over time, you might see lots of fluctuation up or down that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing better/worse. That's why the comparison process and understanding what the metrics do and why they're different than raw counts is important.

Hope that's helpful!

[NachoRetta]

Thank you for your answer Rand.
The DA is now rising again recovering the previous value.
Another thing that surprised me when analyzing changes DA was the large variation in total recorded by MOZ links, which is why I suspected a problem with the algorithm MOZ. I uploaded a picture to show what I mean.
In October the number of links to all the sites I'm comparing dropped a lot, and now in December rose at an even greater value than they had in July.

grClgp2.png

[randfish]

Hi Juan - If I had to guess, I'd say we probably had some issues crawling the sites where your links were (most likely errors on our end, though it's possible the sites themselves had issues, too) over the summer, and we've now rectified it. We're continuing to improve with future indices, and you should see us getting more consistent about this with each release.

[ClaudioHeilborn]

Hi there Rand & Juan!

This is what I really love from Moz, Rand Fishkin in person answering and giving his sincere opinion about what was going wrong with Juan´s question.

Then, further on, when arguments were even more clear and consistent, he changes his opinion and therefore takes responsibility, giving his earnest point of view about possible Moz faults that are under study and certainly will be solved ASAP thus making moz a broader and more reliable tool.

Thanks for being sincere and credible, I understand that's the best way to construct a long term relationship, a widespread community and a profitable & sound company. Keep it up!!

Cheers from Southern (today not sunny) Spain.

Claudio

[NachoRetta]

I understand your answer. I will monitor the coming months as all advances.
Rand thank you very much!