My DA is now the same as it was in January 2019?

I’m a travel blogger, in a tiny but lucrative niche: cruise travel.

I know that domain authority is a fake metric. However, it’s one of the few metrics I have to see if I’m on the right track with my SEO, pleasing Google, and to give me proof of authority to collaborate with other travel bloggers and brands.

A bit of history: I started my cruise travel blog in July 2018. I’ve been tracking my DA since about the second month in, and my increases were slow and steady. Just what I expected.

I actually had to take several months off from blogging (very unexpectedly) in Fall 2018 due to three back-to-back deaths in my close family. While I was gone, my DA and SERP rankings slowly continued to grow.

I started working on my blog again in January 2019, and I noted on my chart that my DA was 11. By Spring I got my DA up to 14, then Moz’ algorithm update hit, and it dropped a bit.

Ever since then, it’s been going up or down by a couple of points with each Moz update, but in late November it just plummeted. It actually dropped to 10.

Honestly? I’m baffled.

Some points to consider:

• I haven’t deleted or significantly changed content except for working on keyword optimization. Without fail, this has improved SERP results for every post I’ve updated.

• I switched my theme from Elegant Themes (Divi) Extra to GeneratePress (pro version) In November to try to improve site speed.

• I audited and deleted several plugins, purchasing some pro versions to consolidate redundancies.

• I’ve been resizing and compressing images in new posts, and auditing old posts for bloated images.

• My social shares continue to grow - I have several in the thousands. I have a new post from November that’s already at about 600 social shares without the heavy promotion I gave to my early posts.

• My organic traffic continues to grow month-after-month.

• My average time on page remains high ~5 minutes.

• When I meet a brand rep in person, they jump at the chance to work with me (and they do). Anyone else (I’m assuming...they don’t give me a reason why) looks at my DA and nopes out.

My blog is a passion project for me right now. I don’t pump out blog posts for a quick win. But, I probably spend 20-25 hours a week on it, so it’s more than a hobby to me.

I try my best to provide heartfelt, well-thought-out free content to my audience.

Honestly? If I think a topic needs 1000 or 2000 or 10,000 words, I’ll keep working until it’s ready to publish. But if it takes 12k words (yes, I have one of those), I’ll take an extra week to write it and make it an amazing resource for my readers.

Does anyone have any insight as to why my DA has been stagnant for so long?

The concept of “you don’t know what you don’t know” has served me well over the years, both as a student and as a teacher. Am I missing something obvious?

My blog is shouldbecruising.com

I’ll take any advice or criticism! It’s a work in progress, but like I said before, I just want to make it better.

Thanks all!!

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