The SEOmoz site says, “Use Domain Authority when comparing one site to another or tracking the “strength” of your website over time.”
If my Domain Authority goes down, should I be upset? Maybe not.
If your SEO competition’s Domain Authority drops too you should be fine, do not freak out. However, if your score drops and their scores stay the same or go up, it’s probably time to look for new opportunities to publish quality content and earn links.
Domain Authority is Not “Faithfully” Linear
While Domain Authority can be used to measure a site’s progress, it is better for comparing sites against each other.
- SEOmoz constantly tweaks how they crawl the web, for example adjusting how deeply they will crawl large sites or how many domains they will try to reach.
- SEOmoz’s ability to index the web is limited and ever evolving. Their data storage is finite and they probably find new web content faster than they can grow capacity.
- The SEOmoz index seems to value quality. As better content gets discovered, weaker content is dropped from the index.
Some Authority is Finite
Domain Authority includes mozRank, which was designed to emulate Google PageRank. PageRank is finite. That means, as more content gets added onto the Internet, the amount of PageRank available to each page decreases a little. The ability to rank can stay the same or go up even when PageRank goes down.
SEO is a Cold War
A decrease in Domain Authority indicates you may not be adding new authority faster than the rest of the Internet. Of course, that’s difficult to accomplish and impractical. You cannot compete with the whole Internet. The practical upshot is it’s not enough to earn more authority. You have to add authority faster than your competitors and keep adding it. Catch-up, pass them, then stay ahead. Always be escalating.
If you are in your forties, you heard Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry on the oldies station. You listened to the final Beatles songs over top forty radio. Depeche Mode, REM and New Order were college alternative and underground music. When Rock n’ Roll arrived in the fifties there were protests, boycotts and bans. The Beatles were long haired freaks and drug fiends. Today, people praise New Order for inventing EDM. Depeche Mode performs on Letterman and at SXSW, with Yahoo as their sponsor.