Is everybody seeing DA/PA-drops after last MOZ-api update?

[tawnycase]

You're not wrong! Seeing a drop in links is likely to mean that our crawlers just didn't pick up those URLs this time around and include them in our index, but in all likelihood those links that we previously reported are still out there on the web. Our tools just haven't re-visited them to add them back into the index.

[NielsVos]

Are you guys seriously using templates to answer questions about a lower DA. -.- ? I've got the exact same answer in the chat...-.- Atleast you could admit something went wrong with the last API-update.... As i'm counting the people here... more then 13 seo-consultants who pay a lot of money per month for accurate tracking all dropped down with a lot of websites.

Normally i wouldn't bother with a dropdown and it will probably be fixed in the next update but some customers even use it as a KPI and we gotta explain them we worked hard but they dropped with 10 points. -.- So answering something like:

"The reasoning behind this can be hard to pinpoint without the help of an SEO consultant or the specific web designer for your website".

Ain't gonna cut it for me..-.- What do you think we are? Atleast give us something we can communicate to our customers. -.- What i see in the API is a loss of:

• Januari 2017 » 1,100,261,648,691 (1.1 trillion) links.
• December 2016 » 1,114,899,547,461 (1.1 trillion) links.

So i could see it as a loss of 14 billion links since the last update? And because those links where lost for all high DA-websites everything dropped down. That would be the answer i aspected.
No hard feelings, but just be transparant with us, so we can communicate it to our customers.

[Cannetastic]

I second that.

[randfish]

Hi Niels - yep, I saw a bit of this too. I believe there's two causes:

1. We crawled a larger swath of the web in this index, so we captured more sites and more links, and that may mean the scaling of PA/DA (which are logarithmic) stretches to accommodate the larger number of links found, especially to sites at the top of the scale. For example, if Facebook has a DA of 100 with 5 Billion links, then we find 5 billion more links to it, Facebook still has a DA of 100, but it's a much higher threshold. Thus, sites with fewer links (and less quality links) will fall in DA as the scale is now stretched.

2. We crawled some weird stuff in this index, by mistake (or rather, because spammers built some nasty, deep crawl holes that Google probably didn't fall for but we did). A ton of odd domains on strange ccTLDs were seen, and crawled, because they gamed PageRank with lots of sketchy links. We've now excluded these for indices going forward, and hopefully will see the impact abate.

All that said, over time, as our index grows, you can expect that raw DA/PA numbers could get harder to achieve, meaning a lot of sites will drop in PA/DA (and some will grow too, as we discover more links to them in the broader web). My best advice is always to not use PA/DA as absolutes, but rather relative scores. That's how they're designed and how they work best.

It's like back when Google had PageRank, and Moz.com grew from PR4 to PR7, then as Google got bigger and bigger, and the web got bigger, Moz.com fell to PR5, even though we had way more links and ranked for way more stuff. The raw PR scale had just become stretched, so our PageRank fell, even though we'd been improving.

[therealfudgypup]

Yeah all my own and client sites are down 2-4 points.  I'm seeing a decline in backlinks tracked so I thought that may be a factor.  It's either a one time change moving forward or perhaps a bug that will correct itself next week?  No idea.

[tawnycase]

If we found fewer links to your sites with this index update, that can certainly be a factor in why you may have seen your Domain Authority drop a bit. These fluctuations aren't out of the ordinary, for all the reasons Rand mentions above - the number of backlinks in our index, and the quality of those links, will impact your DA scores.

You may see your DA bounce back after our next index update. This isn't scheduled for next week - our indexes take approximately 4 weeks to process. It looks like the next update is scheduled for February 28th. You can check this page for details on the Mozscape Index update any time: https://moz.com/products/api/updates

Hope that helps!

[Cannetastic]

Thanks for the logical answer, makes a lot of sense.

[NielsVos]

Thnx! That explains a lot

[muzzmoz]

I have a client who has dropped from DA16 to DA1 and lost the few links he had he's NOT happy!!

Haven't just spent a few weeks impressing upon him the importance of building up his DA, it's been pretty hard trying to pacify him over this.

Great explanation from Rand, but c'mon MOZ when are you going to fix this?

And when are you going to enable tracking of DA? AuthorityLabs and others can do it for keyword ranking. I'm sure you can do it for DA and PA.

It appears their primary competitor has maintained their DA of 19. So can someone please explain this added twist?