Domain authority of competitor went up drastically

[Gael_Regnault]

Hello Moz community,

I’m following one of my competitors on Moz, and I noticed a huge bump in his domain authority overnight, going from 8 to 53.

I figured there must have been a reason for that, so I checked their links overview, and noticed they got tons of new external followed links, followed linking domains and total linking domains (see screenshot 1).

I clicked on the external followed links to see what they are, and I saw tons of redirect notices (see screenshot 2).

The links are from google:

• maps.google.co.fr

• cse.google.co.fr

• images.google.co.fr

And .fr is just an example, they have tons of other cctlds like .it .ca .es… the list goes on (see screenshot 3)

Do you know where these redirect notices are from? It may be worth noting that some of these redirect to the http version of his website, while others redirect to the https version.

I’m guessing this must be a bug on Moz’s end or some sort of SEO trick, but did his DA really go up that much, and does it positively affect his website or will Google penalize this?

Thank you in advance for your answers!

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[Chris.Menke]

Someone else was asking about links similar to these and Staff asked them to email Moz support about it.  Have you gone that route?

[Gael_Regnault]

Well I'm not sure if it's a problem from Moz, I would just like to know why and how his domain authority could get increased this way

Since it's not my website, I'm not really looking for a way to fix this, just trying to understand

I will send a message to Moz support though just in case they have an answer

[Chris.Menke]

How about the site's rankings, have they changed since you started seeing the links?

[Gael_Regnault]

His rankings are steadily going up for a few weeks now, but I haven't seen any particular change for the keywords we're tracking since I saw the links appear yesterday. I guess I will have to wait until tomorrow's update to see the changes in rankings.

Please let me know if you would like more infos! Thank you or helping

[EGOL]

Make a list of the content pages that you could write that would be most valuable for your site visitors.

Start writing, don't look at DA for six months, do what is valuable for your visitor, create what they want, create what will help convert sales on your site.

Do you know that Google does not use DA?   It is a Moz number.  It will not win anything for you.

So instead of watching a number that means nothing, spend your time on content that will win your wars.  The more you look at DA the less work you will get done.