Our Domains DA has dropped from 52 to 17

[JudyLam]

Hi, 
Our domain's DA (www.tricorglobal.com) has dropped drastically from 52 to 17 on Mar 2019. And has only gone up to 21 now. Is there a reason why this happened. On the other hand, our competitor's score has increased.

Is there a valid reason for this? How can I find out what is hurting our DA and how can I fix this?

[jasongmcmahon]

Hello, the short answer is Moz has updated how DA is calculated - https://moz.com/domain-authority-2.0

I've had a quick look at your backlink profile & recommend that you thoroughly review it & disavow some of the High Spam & low DA Linking Domains of which there are roughly:

• 1263 Linking Domains with a high or non-descernable SPAM score - 75% & above SPAM score or marked as -%
• 1876 Linking Domain with a low DA - DA 10 & below
• 1196 with a combination of high or non-discernable SPAM score as well as a low DA

This is my personal starting point for weeding out bad  Linking Domains, it has worked successfully on many occasions.

Also - have you made changes to the site over the period of time your domain dropped? Has your competitor for that mater?

[effectdigital]

Moz's Link Explorer (which succeeds OSE / Open Site Explorer) is still very new. It's still discovering backlinks (for its new MLE index) which other tools have logged long ago. This means that when Moz does discover large chunks of links which it previously didn't know about, DA scores can shift quite radically in a matter of seconds (not because anything has actually changed, rather because Moz's view has changed!)

My suspicion is Moz has just uncovered a load of links pointing to the site which have existed for a long time, yet which Moz Link Explorer (MLE) hadn't previously noticed

I think it's probably these ones:

https://d.pr/i/QsznTV.png (Ahrefs screenshot)

They seemed to mostly appear (or at least, were mostly detected by Ahrefs) between 3rd January 2016 and 10th February 2016

Maybe the issue is something different, but to me it 'sounds like' MLE has uncovered a 'stash' of spammy legacy links which it was previously unaware of. This would correlate with what Joe has found

[ClaytonJ]

Comparably has there been any traffic impact?  To yourself or competitor... ?

As DA is a guide only..

[effectdigital]

This is an absolutely key question, as Google do not use Moz's DA metric in their ranking algorithm (it is a useful indicator, but a 'shadow metric' only)

[eli.myers]

Hi!

The above answers are all great! Just to add on:

DA drop can be attributed to a few things:

1.Links we previously discovered are now marked as lost.
2. You've earned more links, but the highest authority sites have grown their link profile even more.
3. The links you've earned are from sites that we haven't seen correlate well with higher Google rankings.
4. We've done a better or worse job crawling sites/pages that have links to you (or don't).

It's a bit difficult to isolate the exact cause of what happened without your own SEO consultant or developer being able to take a dive into this, but you can definitely read more specific information here if you'd like to understand more about the process:).

Best,

Eli