Why did my Authority change?
Because Domain Authority (and, for that matter, Page Authority) is comprised of multiple metrics and calculations, pinpointing the exact cause of a change can be a challenge. If your score has gone up or down, there are many potential influencing factors including things like:
- Your link profile growth hasn't yet been captured in our web index.
- The highest-authority sites experienced substantial link growth, skewing the scaling process.
- You earned links from places that don't contribute to Google ranking.
- We crawled (and included in our index) more or fewer of your linking domains than we had previously.
- Your Domain Authority is on the lower end of the scoring spectrum and is thus more impacted by scaling fluctuation.
You can read more about how to interpret these (and other) fluctuations in Authority scores here.
The key to understanding Page and Domain Authority fluctuations is that these metrics don't exist in a vacuum — they depend on many positive and negative factors so that even if a given site improves its SEO, its Authority score(s) may not always reflect it. A good metaphor to help understand why is how "best of" rankings work. Let's look at an example:
If Singapore has the best air quality in 2015, and improves it even further in 2016, are they guaranteed to remain at #1? What if Denmark also improves its air quality, or New Zealand (which, say, had been left out of the rankings in 2015) joins the rating system? Maybe countries 2–10 all improved dramatically and Singapore has now fallen to #11, even though they technically got better, not worse. Because there are many other factors at play, Singapore's ranking could change in spite of any action (or inaction) whatsoever on their part.
Domain Authority (and Page Authority) works in a similar fashion. Since they're scaled on a 100-point system, after each update, the recalculations mean that the Authority score of a given page/site could go down even if that page/site has improved their link quantity and quality. Such is the nature of a relative, scaled system. As such — and this is important enough that we'll emphasize it once more — Authority scores are best viewed as comparative rather than absolute metrics.
Keep learning
- Page Authority
- External Links
- When and How to Use Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Link Count Metrics
- How to Rank: 25-Step Master Blueprint
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