Because Domain Authority aggregates so many pieces of data, it can be difficult to influence directly. This metric is meant to predict how competitive a given site will be in Google search results, and since Google considers so many ranking factors in determining its rankings, a metric that tries to approximate its determinations must incorporate a similar number and complexity of factors.
Why did my Domain Authority change?
Because Domain Authority comprises 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 rankings.
- We crawled (and included in our index) more or fewer of your linking domains than we had in a previous crawl.
- Your Domain Authority is on the lower end of the scoring spectrum and is thus more impacted by scaling fluctuations.
- Your site was affected by the 2019 implementation of Domain Authority 2.0, which caused a 6% average decrease in DA across all websites due to restructuring and improvements to the way DA is calculated.
The key to understanding Domain Authority fluctuations is recognizing that each domain’s score depends on comparison to other domains all across the DA scale, so that even if a website improves its SEO, its Authority score may not always reflect that. Let's look at how "best of" rankings work as a theoretical illustration:
If Singapore has the best air quality in 2020, and then improves it even further in 2021, are they guaranteed to remain at #1 on the best air quality list? What if Denmark also improves its air quality, or what if New Zealand joins the rating system with extremely high air quality in 2021 after having been left out of the rankings in 2020? Maybe the countries ranking 2–10 all improved dramatically and Singapore falls to #11 even though their air got better during that time. Because the scale itself has changed, Singapore's ranking could change independent of any action (or inaction) on their part.
Domain Authority works in a similar fashion. Since it’s based on machine learning and constantly compared against every other website on the scale, after each update, recalculations mean that the score of a given site could go down even if that site has improved its link profile. Such is the nature of a relative, scaled system. Therefore — and this is important enough that we'll emphasize it once more — Authority scores are best viewed as comparative rather than absolute metrics.
