Explanation of Drop in Domain Authority: 31 to 26 in Four Months
-
Dear Moz Community:
Domain Authority for my site has dropped to 26. It was about 35 a year ago and has dropped to 26 a few days ago from 29 as recently as last month. In the meantime Google Page rank has dropped from 4 to 2.
Page authority for my home page remains pretty stable at about 37.
Strangely site traffic increased about 25% in early October after the most recent Penguin update, going form about 130 to 170 visits per day.
I ordered a web site audit from a MOZ recommended SEO firm last October. Since November we have focused on implementing suggestions in their audit.We have removed duplicate content from about 30 pages (our site is 500 pages), slightly modified the architecture of the site to allow better indexing of property listings (I run a real estate site), had a mirror site hosted by former developer de-indexed, added structured mark-up language and made some other minor changes.
The audit concluded that about 45% of the domains linking to my site were toxic, 45% suspicious and the remaining 10%. I have yet to take action to remove the bad domains and work on building quality links. But these bad links have existed for the last several years.
I would like to know if anyone has any ideas as to why the drop in my Domain Authority appears to be accelerating? Is this tied with my implementation of the audit suggestions or could it be something else?
I should mention that I have not engages in any social media for about two three months. From January to August I would tweet, Google+, Facebook regularly adding links to my site. Also I have been adding an average of 2-3 blog posts a month, with the exception of November where none were added.
How serious is this drop? Can I recover domain authority through link building? Would removing the toxic links result in a partial recovery?
-
Another thing to keep in mind is how the DA of your competitors has been behaving over the same period. The number doesn't matter so much as how it moves in relation to your competition.
-
I don't have the knowledge to address the rest of your questions, but I do want to let you know there's a bit of an unnatural drop in DA for some sites this index, and it will be fixed in the next index. You may see up to a two point decrease that's our fault, not yours, in this most recent index.
I would add to look also at what the search engines think of your site. Has the number of visitors changed? Have your leads changed? If they're not going down, or if they're going up, then don't sweat the DA metric and enjoy the increase.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do I need to worry about sub-domains?
Hi Moz commnity, Our website ranking was good and dropped for couple of recent months. We have around 10 sub-domains. I doubt them if they are hurting us. Being said all over in SEO industry like the sub-domains are completely different websites; will they hurt if they are not well optimised? And we have many links from our sub-domains to website top pages, is this wrong for Google? How to well maintain the sub-domains? Do I need to worry about them? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Redirecting a Few URLs to a New Domain
We are in the process of buying the blog section of a site. Let's say Site A is buying Site B. We have taken the content from Site B and replicated it on Site A, along with the exact url besides the TLD. We then issued 301 redirects from Site B to Site A and initiated a crawl on those original Site B urls so Google would understand they are now redirecting to Site A. The new urls for Site A, with the same content are now showing up in Google's index if we do a site:SiteA.com search on the big G. Anyone have any experience with this as to how long before Site A urls should replace Site B urls in the search results? I undestand there may be a ranking difference and CTR difference based on domain bias, etc... I'm just asking if everything goes as planned and there isn't a huge issue, does the process take weeks or months?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
301 redirecting staff Domain to Company Domain
My colleague owns a domain (A) for about 10 years that he does not use. The domain's content is the same as my company's website (B) content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
Question: Can I 301 redirect domain A to domain B's homepage or is it better he just closes down his website since this would not be SEO best practices? thank you0 -
Domain authority enhancement
Dear all, what is the best way to increase your domain authority in a couple of weeks? Thanks for your reply! Best regards, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HMK-NL0 -
Rankings Dropped
Hello, I wonder if anyone can point us in the right direction. Our main domain name has got a good SEO profile the domain is 12 years old and we have some good reputable links. On the 7th of Jan our website dropped in the rankings from 3rd to 10th for one of our main keywords and from then onwards some of our other keywords have dropped. We have a lot of landing pages that target specific keywords which look like a template page but just with the content changed. Can anyone pin point what could of caused this problem or has anyone experienced this before and knows how to fix it. I personally think we have been hit by the panda. Thanks, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Domain buying
hello Mozzers - a bit shout out to all of you. Question - I have a 3 keyword, and the domain is available - the only thing is it has a hyphen example: black-book-covers.com Is it worth getting this domain? There is a fair amount of traffic to this domain. Thank you all - we love you, Best, Vijay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vijayvasu0 -
Sudden drop and Rise in SERPs
Our site was affected by panda but now we have recovered almost. But some strange things are going with our site for example Traffic for some pages has been dropped(over 100 position) overnight and recover. (graph is attached for a page). We have dropped(over 100 position) on all keywords for a page except a single keyword (staying on first or 2n position). Our home page is not ranking in top 100 position for title keywords. Is our website under any type of filter or penalized by Google?. What is your opinion about our internal link structure and content? URL http://bit.ly/rvxzDm and graph for this page is attached for sample data. looking for your opinion and suggestions. Thanks IXT0m.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexgray0 -
Google Author: Is there a Limit to How Many Authors to Include?
We have multiple freelance writers that work for us. Should we require all of them to create a google + profile with authorship?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0