Big drop in Domain Authority

[randfish]

Hey gang - thought I'd jump in with some official word from the Mozscape/Big Data team:

This latest index is smaller than prior ones, meaning we indexed fewer webpages total. However, the quality and importance of those pages in general is higher. In particular we've cut out a exceedingly large number of pages and subdomains on many Chinese sites that appeared to be biasing our crawl priorities and giving us some serious processing trouble.

DA, PA, and link metrics have maintained very similar correlations with Google rankings in this index, so if you've seen a large drop in either, it may be related to the removal of links that Google may not have been counting very highly. However, it's also possible that you've lost DA/PA from links that Google did count and Moz should be, too. As we regrow our index size in the next 2-3 updates, you may see a return of those scores. We do expect the next few indices to process much more quickly than the lag we experienced in the last few, and are watching indices very closely to make sure we're on the right track.

Also, with DA/PA drops, note that every index these occur, primarily because the sites and pages at the very top of the metrics scale (with PA/DA scores in the 99-100 range) are growing their link profiles massively, thus stretching what it means to have those incredibly high scores. If you had a DA of 90, and gained great links at the same rate you did last year, but many other DA 90+ sites were growing their link profiles even more rapidly (which tends to be how the web goes - the rich get richer, faster, every month), your DA would likely fall a few points even though you technically are still growing your link profile. DA/PA of 100 gets harder and harder to achieve every index because of the rate of growth of pages like Twitter.com, Google.com, and Facebook.com.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Great information, Rand. Thanks!

[roberthseo]

Hi Rand,

Thanks for the detailed reply. That's really helpful.

Our total number of links went down from 2080 in May to 576 in June.

See attached a screenshot from OSE showing the difference between the two indexes.

Robert

m6VYDbX.jpg

[randfish]

Yeah - that's likely a combination of the new index being smaller and of us cutting out stuff that we think Google may not have been counting. In future indices, you should see it go up again. My advice is always to watch your competition's numbers, too, as relative indices like Mozscape will reflect those changes best in relative numbers.

[CandymanKen]

Thanks for a great explanation,I agree with Jordan that checking competitors trends was a great addition. We saw a small drop is DA and I was at first concerned,but then noticed we did fine relative to our competitors. Thanks Kyle

[BrianJGomez]

Perhaps I'm the squeaky wheel here, and I understand that's not the culture on these forums (which I'm ALL for 99.9999% of the time) ... but to me, if the DA's are going to go back up, why drop them?  For us, DA is something we educate our clients on, we preach it's credibility/accuracy, and we ask our clients to hold us accountable to it. But now, I'm going to have to essentially undermine its credibility to explain to my clients that this is a large scale drop and it should go back up again soon.

I'm done being the squeaky wheel now. I am a big believer in DA and Moz in general ... these forums have the sharpest people in the industry. I just felt compelled to express some frustration.

[randfish]

Hi Brian - that's not quite accurate. It isn't that DA scores are all going to go up - in fact, many of the ones that were higher in our last couple indices probably should have been lower, and this is more a correction/normalization. As I noted in another response here, following a single DA score can be very unrepresentative of reality vs. following many scores in a niche across competitors. DA fluctuates as Google updates their ranking algorithm because DA uses machine learning against Google's SERPs (and ~once a year) we retrain our model.

Domain Authority scores aren't great ways to know how you're performing in SEO in absence of context, but they can be very good to see how you're performing against other sites in your industry or with whom you're competing in search results.

Every new index we produce has lots of scores going up and down because the link profiles that correlate best with ranking higher in Google change, the links we discover change, the sites that get penalized or that grow rankings substantially change, etc. Domain Authority is less like a fixed metric that grows as you grow your link profile and more a relative metric that changes as the web and Google change.

Hope that helps!

[Krishey]

Agree. Thank you!

[dynamyt100]

I need some help here too please guys. I got the dreaded manual penalty last month (Unnatural links to your site—impacts links. Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more.)due to a mysterious donator of spammy links. I suspect a competitor has done this. Admittedly when I started the site years ago I was using bad techniques but have since converted to all white hat best practices. Ive been working desperately to disavow and am about to embark on a very costly content exercise to gain some real quality links. However, since Google gave me the message my life is in a downward spiral as my site literally feeds me and my children. My DA has gone from 49 to 15 (I lost about 150 links to the disavow), my ranks are dropping daily. Is this huge drop in DA due to the disavowed links?

What can i do to save my site?

Unnatural links to your site—impacts links

Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole.Learn more.

[naracci]

My Site is new only been live around 2 months. When i bought the domain it all ready had one backlink and my domain authority from just that one was 21, however yesterday that link seemed to have been removed and by domain authority has dropped to 1. It does not make any sense that one domain can impact so much. Despite this I have been working hard to add many more links but none of these have appeared and some are from major authority websites.  My domain is https://www.stampit.co.uk/

Can you kindly shed some light on this. Many Thanks

[randfish]

Hi Naracci - it's possible that the Mozscape index (which certainly doesn't have perfect coverage, but rather a more representative crawl coverage) hasn't seen all the links to your site. As you get them from more notable domains and pages, though, we should pick them up and you'll see that reflected in your DA/PA scores.