Why the rapid drop in Domain Authority?
-
I couple weeks ago I switched my website from Drupal to a Wordpress CMS: Martial Arts Austin My rankings have remained the same, but the Domain Authority has plummeted from like 29 to 21. I know this is small fry, but I don't want my business to drop in ranking.
The URL's were kept exactly the same, with the internal links and copy also kept the same with few additions.
Also, according to Open Site Explorer, the site's stronger pages have now averaged out with the weaker and unused pages so they all now share the same Page Authority - that doesn't seem right. Is there reason for concern?
Did I screw something up, or am I making too much of this?
Thanks
-
There is one other possibility and that would be the "canonical redirect." If your site is PMA (only one I saw with PA 21 in serps), when you put www.yourdomain.com in you get a page auth of 33 to go with your DA 21. But, when you put in the root without the www, ( yourdomain.com ) you get a PA of 18 and your linking root domains drop a bit.... from 42 to 1.
In WordPress, with any of the SEO plugins we have used (All in one, Genesis, etc), the canonical redirect does not happen. You have to do it in the .htaccess file. There are plenty of good directions for how to: query .htaccess redirects. Or, there are several gurus around moz who can post directions here..... (I'm not one)
My guess is that when you do this, you will see a change in short time (few weeks at most).
-
Hi Steve.
The most likely cause of your DA drop is some URLs from the old site no longer exist on the new site. Something was missed.
The easiest way to test this theory is to compare a list of your backlink profile from the old site with the backlink profile of the new site. If you didn't track your backlinks in the past, then I suggest you start now as it is a good tool to help troubleshooting this type of issue. A few other items to check out:
-
Did you use any 302 redirects? If so, that is an issue as the link value does not flow when a 302 is used.
-
Did you remove ANY pages from your site during the CMS migration? If so, those pages may have had links which contributed to your site's overall DA.
-
It's also possible a site which linked to you previously decided to remove the link at the same time as the CMS change.
I tried to look at your site and noticed it is redirected to http://www.meetup.com/pmaustin/. Your site is a martial arts site where this is a project management site. Something seems wrong.
-
-
There was an update to Open Site Explorer on September 13th that might account for the change in domain authority, and it may well be that your DA would have had the same change even if you hadn't touched your site. Here's a blog post from Rand about the latest OSE update: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-september-update-feedback.
Having the same PA across all of the pages doesn't sound right. For that, I'd send an email to the help desk at help@seomoz.org and let them know about it.
I'd say don't panic just yet!
Keri
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Traffic drop with no explaination
Hello Everyone, I made a post a few months ago about one of my sites, Poker On A Mac dropping off the face of google. I found out that it was hacked, and redirecting traffic from google to other, pharmacy websites. Doing some research, I found out it was the WordPress PharmaHack, and we ended up recovering from it. Now, since October 23rd traffic has went down again mainly organic traffic, I tried to see if it was hacked again, with the same thing and their was nothing I noticed. I was wondering if anyone could give me any insights as to why this happened? Thanks Zach CwFda.png
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Malware ranking drops
Hi, One of our sites got hit with malware in November. We cleaned it up and sent a reconsideration request and no malware warnings are in WMT anymore. We still haven't seen an improvement in rankings even though people say it can take up to 90days? Organic traffic is down 40% and still dropping. Any advice? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Domain authority and keyword difficulty
I know there are too many variables for a certain answer, however do people take their domain authority into account when using keyword difficulty tool? I have a new domain which only has a score of seven at the moment. When using the keyword searching tool what is the maximum difficulty level keywords people would target initially? Obviously I would seek to increase the difficulty of the words over time but to start off its a hard choice between keywords which can be ranked for in a reasonable period of time and the keywords which are getting enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Drop down navigation and link juice
Hi! We are desperately needing to overhaul our site navigation setup, and we have so many categories that we think our site could really benefit from a drop down navigation similar to what these sites have: http://www.paychex.com/ http://www.bmc.com/ We've held off doing this type of navigation in the past because we were only seeing people use flash to create it and we knew that it wouldn't be good for link juice. But these two sites are using HTML and CSS - which seems like a much better style and good for SEO. Do you agree? We want to make the switch but are worried about losing linking power by nesting our navigation in 's and CSS styling.
Technical SEO | | sciway0 -
Sub Domains
Hi,,, Okay we have 1 main site , a few years back we went down the road of sub domains and generated about 10. They have page rank and age but we wish to move them back to the main web site. What is the correct or best way to achieve this. 1 copy all content to the main web site creating dup pages and then use a redirects from the sub pages to the new dup pages on the main domain... or 2 write new content on the main domain for the subdomain pages and redirect to the new content. Problem with 2 is the amount of work involved...
Technical SEO | | NotThatFast0 -
Using hyphenated sub-domains or non-hyphenated sub-domains? What is the question! I Any takers?
For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project. Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past. I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index. Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer! Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0 -
When should you turn off redirects to your new domain?
Our website moved to a new domain a year ago, and we have our original domain to redirect to our new domain. We're working on contacting people who still link to our old domain to ask them to update, but 7% of our traffic is still coming as a redirect from our old domain. My question is, when should we just shut the old domain down entirely and stop redirecting people to our new domain? Or should we just keep it up indefinitely? What would be the positive or negative impact on our new domain's SEO if we shut the old domain down? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | UWPCE0