OSE Getting Less Accurate

[Atomicx]

It seems that the more links I get the lower my DA is. My DA has been dropping for some time now as I gain more backlinks. It also does not seem to pick up anywhere close to the number of domains that is linking to my site. My url is hiddentriforce.com

GWT says I have over 600 domains linking in. The majority of the links are from news or articles that we cover which other sites pick up and link to us as the source. We also have a ton of scholarship links from .edu and education sites from a giveaway that we do every year for students. Why does OSE seem to lower my DA the more I get off-page factors to the site?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

First, always check Moz's health section to see if there are any issues that may be giving you odd information.

Second, I would go through a few backlink sources to get more data than just Search Console:
Majestic
OSE
Ahrefs
Kerboo

All of the above can help you get more data sets and score your profile. I would check all of your backlinks and see if there are any you can remove or even disavow. I would make sure you vet links by asking the following questions:

• Does this link help my website?

• Does it send quality traffic?

• Is this link relevant to my website?

• Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it?

• Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website?

• If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy?

• Are the links from directory templates? (example)

• Inspect URLs with blatant spam words

• Free

• Porn

• XXX

• Submit

• Directory

• Paid

• Links

• URL

• Sex

• etc.

• Check for multiple domains and URLs on the same IPs

• This can usually show link farms or spam

• Don't be quick to discount nofollow links - nofollow's do provide value, so as long as they pass your sniff test, don't remove them simply because of this tag

It sounds like there could potentially be issues with your backlink profiles, so I would give those a run through and see if there are any issues that arise. I also noticed that your top linking website is a redirect from legendzelda.net - so, you're inheriting all of their backlinks as well - I would make sure you run through those as well as you are potentially taking on their issues.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[kevin.loesken]

Hello!

Thanks for reaching out to us and I'm sorry to hear you are seeing a lower domain authority score lately. Over the last few months, our index size has been increasing significantly and we recently reached a milestone of 300 billion links! Unfortunately, we could not release a similar amount for this month and had to cut the index size in half in order to prevent further delays. Our founder and current product architect has more detail about the situation here: http://moz.com/community/q/what-s-the-story-on-mozscape-updates

To compare the numbers from the previous index, you can view those details here: https://moz.com/products/api/updates

Hope this helps and we hope our next release will bring your scores back up! If you have further questions about this, feel free to write into us at help@moz.com.

Thanks!

Kevin
Help Team