Large Domain Authority Drop - Please Help

[SkycraftNate]

Hey there all,

We are having the toughest time trying to figure out why our domain authority went from 12 to 3 with a search visibility score of literally zero.  Back in Feb when the D.A.'s were all updated, we went down while all our competitors went up.  We've been stuck at 3 for a few months and we can't understand why and aren't sure if we are dealing with a penalty of sorts.

www.skycraftstudios.com is our site.

We have a total of 60 some odd links in Search Console (some are garbage that we have disavowed, others are quality) but none of them are getting picked up in the newer MoZ index.

We have added a few quality links lately, and even sped up our site quite a bit in conjunction with standard best practice optimizations, and even added an SSL cert, yet we stuck at a terrible D.A. of 3 and aren't even able to get into the top 10 pages of our main targeted term which seems incredibly odd to us.  The site has been up for almost 2 years.

Could this be simply a matter of not enough quality inbound links from the index?  Any insight here would be appreciated.

[ThomasHarvey]

As the moz index grows in size, Moz may have crawled some lower quality sites that have actually lowered your domain authority.

Have you seen an actual drop in traffic? As whilst Moz is a useful metric, the truly important metric is rankings/traffic.

[SkycraftNate]

Hey Thomas,

Thanks for the response.  Our organic traffic has been fairly anemic since it's inception so it's honestly hard to tell but it did go down slightly in Feb when we dropped in D.A.  We have the site optimized as best we can (hopefully not over optimized).

The strange thing is that this time last year we were performing better than we are today organically.  Our competitors are also all performing better and we aren't showing up for any of our terms in the top 5 pages whatsoever which leads me to believe something else is going on here.  We have decent content compared to some competitors even on page 1 and a few of them don't even have an impressive number of back links either yet they are ranking well and we aren't ranking at all...not even in the top 100 for a lot of our main terms...even our local terms like "denver video production company" which is our main target.  We should easily be ranking somewhere for that term since it's so localized even if was 50 that would at least be something.  Can't figure it out.

I honestly feel like if we wiped out all of our backlinks at this point, we would probably be doing better than we are now because it doesn't get much worse than D.A. 3 with zero search visibility.

[ThomasHarvey]

Have you got a link to your site? I'd happily have a quick look around your site if you want from an on-site perspective? (If you don't want to post it publicly please do pm me it)

[Sigma_Digital]

Hi Nathanial,

Looking at your site I cant see a great deal of issues with it at all. A few things that I always swear by is to remember the basics. Although there is a lot on ongoing debate as to whether a H1 on the site is useful, it does give the page a key focus.

With regards to the content on your page, it all looks great but as you have not specified a H1 I would worry about the use of your brand name within the content.

I have done some analysis and I can see you Brand name appears 202 times on your home page, this may be seen from search engines as intentionally stuffing so my advice would be to remove the excessive us of the brand name.

I hope that helps and good luck getting back up to a good score.

[Deacyde]

Hello,

I ran your site through ahref.com and saw 16 backlinks, when I looked at follow backlinks I saw 10, of those 10 backlinks I see that 8 of those 10 backlinks contain the same anchor text for the same article " The Great History Freeze to preserve photographic negatives: Join The Great History Freeze and help preserve a collection of invaluable and irreplaceable negatives. "

This I'd imagine is what is costing you your DA drop, since you basically have 3 follow backlinks, if google is even counting that as legitimate links. You could be suffering a negative SEO issue from those domains using the same text, as well it seems pretty spammy. Now a days google seems to be counting backlinks that are bad less or not at all. I'd imagine that this would be the case and could bet a DA increase would happen if you could acquire even 3 to 5 more backlinks from legit sources.

So far, I've seen more correlation between DA and backlinks than I have DA and SEO. I see sites with crap for SEO but a decent backlink profile climb higher and faster in DA than a site with epic SEO and a handful of backlinks or even hundreds of crap backlinks. Quality always matters over quantity.