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@ThompsonPaul Moz was warning me about thin content and I got the idea that it was because of "/" from https://datayze.com/thin-content-checker.php?domain=https%3A%2F%2Falphalapia.com¶meters=&exclude=&elementtype=limit&elements= which said zero unique phrases maybe it's because i have "Home" and "Home_master" although the Home_master has eye crossed out (shouldnt be visible to goog)

Thanks, Mike agreed!

Good for you, Rswhtn, for trying to get your key points into a list. I'm going to agree with Andy here: this list is something you need to take to company that does both local and organic SEO for a real audit. Trying to guess at this, without looking at your timeline, analytics, Google Search Console, competitive landscape, etc., is just going to be making random guesses as to why whatever has happened to your specific business has happened. You could be dealing with filters or penalties, you could be dealing with Google more highly localizing organic results in other places leading to you being edged out of anything but organic rankings for your own city, there could be a technical issue with your robots.txt. It could be so many things. The loss of traffic seems like enough of a reason to get a real audit going for this, so that no more time is being lost with your revenue being impacted.

First, let me say something that may sound strange coming from a Moz employee. Don't try to raise DA. DA is a proxy for your link authority, and if you get obsessed with trying to raise that score alone, you may find yourself link-building in artificial ways. This isn't unique to Moz -- I'd say the same thing about raising toolbar PR in the old days. In a broader, conceptual sense, DA attempts to measure your overall authority. Ultimately, this is a product of PA and means getting high-quality links to a variety of pages (ideally). From a pure DA perspective, that means links from high-DA domains and a diversity of domains (not thousands of links from a handful of sites). From a broader perspective -- which DA doesn't measure -- pursuerelevant links that will drive traffic and produce value. So "How do you raise domain authority?" really becomes "How do you build high-quality links?" and that's a tremendously difficult question to answer. Or, maybe better to say that the answer isn't one most people want to hear, because it's going to require a lot of time, energy, and probably money. I will add this -- don't get tunnel-vision on links from super-high-DA sites. Not every link has to be from the New York Times. Links from low DA sites that are relevant and legitimate are perfectly fine. Plus, it's going to be much easier to approach these sites and build relationships with them, especially in your own industry. Find the sites that would naturally want to link to you, because you offer something of value to them. They don't have to be mega-sites that dominate the web.

Thanks Ruth, that all makes sense and the reason for our quality over quantity approach so far has been because we're committed to white hat techniques which will give us lasting results. As far as we see it, our website looks better than the competition, we have higher quality content and articles, we have higher quality backlinks, a better ahrefs rank (although understand this isn't a google metric). The only difference we can see, is the fact that we have less links. We're committed to building more authority to the site via high quality editorial links, however it is very frustrating to be outranked constantly by people who are using only spammy techniques. Another consideration is that one of our competitors who consistently ranks #1 on all of our keywords, has a 1 page website with 600 words of text on it, yet they're ranking for 700 keywords; most of which don't appear in their backlink profile which we have studied in depth, or on his site. It seems to be one rule for the competition and another for us.

Hi rswhtn, We have not seen proof of structured data having a direct impact on general organic rankings. However, we're confident that clickthrough rate does have an impact on rankings (see Rand's Whiteboard Friday on this here, as well as Larry Kim's post). Since "rich results" (rich snippets) can impact clickthrough rate, the should then have a secondary impact on rankings. That said, it doesn't sound like your homepage had a rich result from this use of structured data. It's also not clear whether/how Google uses this postal address data. Since it's not likely been implemented at any significant scale across the web, I'd be dubious if it were a useful ranking signal for them. It's possible, but I'd call it unlikely. We have seen rankings fluctuate significantly across client accounts even when the pages in question have not been updated. It seems that Google's AI/Engineering team iterate on search results frequently. So, in short, I suspect this has to do with something other than structured data. The significant changes to the homepage may be involved (UX can have a significant impact on rankings), but these changes could very well have generated a net gain in terms of overall traffic/results in spite of this lost head term position. Unfortunately I think easy/clear answers on this will prove evasive. If you have the data (via Ahrefs or otherwise), I'd recommend reviewing the "flux" in the top 10 search results for "clothing manufacturers" around this time. If yours is not the only result that shifted significantly in this time frame, it's like part of a larger shift in Google's ranking algorithm. Best, Mike