Domain Authority and Page Authority down - Change of Server
-
Dear All,
Today I noticed that our page authority and domain authority is down, and the number of linking domains is also down. We do not have too many linking domains to our site, but at least one blogger link to us, with a very nice article about our site (since some months ago) and this link does not appear in the site explorer (follow link). This blog is well indexed by google, but impossible to see using open site explorer for some reason unknown to me; and two pages we helped, and they link also to us (follow links): their links appear in the webmaster tools, but not in the site explorer. Neither the blog nor those two pages were in the site explorer before, the links that were removed are from other sources (SEO analisys pages, automatic generated when I run a test by them, so I supossed not high quality links at all, not content related, we don't miss them).
Our site was partially down for 1 1/2 day this week due change of server, from a shared hosting to a VPS. Now all pages are up again, and we are improving everything, working really hard (almost no sleep at all in two days). Could it also have something to do with the lower domain authority? How bad penalized google the time down of a domain? How long will we feel the effects of that?
Listing published in our site are ranking exactly as before, but I am afraid this could change in the near future.
Since the end of December (not directly related to my question), we do not have this nice snipped showing the main pages of our site, when we writte the exact domain name in google. At the time, we did not any change, and this did not affect the listings ranking (they even improved in some cases); we rank better for the main keyword, so the snipped changed, without other problems.
So, the questions:
-
Have made site explorer any change in the last days, to discard low quality links?
-
Could be the lower domain authority related to the down time of our site?
-
How long can be felt the effects of the down time in google results? Is it something that can be felt forever? =(
-
Do you have any idea why google decides in some cases to remove the site links in the snipped? General question, I know it is not possible to answer it for any specific domain without looking at it. We would like to have those links again.
-
Is there something we can do in order site explorer visit that blog I mentioned? I will try to crawl it using the dashboard to see what happen.
Many thanks for your help!
Daniel
-
-
Howdy Daniel,
Some good information here, let me add my own 2 cents;
1. Mozscape and Open Site Explorer are updated about every 4 weeks. The metrics are entirely link-based, so downtime of your server won't effect the numbers.
Because we use a new index every few weeks, there's a natural fluctuation in the number of links we find. There are literally billions and billions of links on the web we have to crawl every month, calculate metrics for each one, and then package them into an index that makes sense.
Sometimes links will disappear or re-appear in the index. This is natural and usually minor, although a large jump or decrease in your Domain Authority can be scary - it doesn't mean your traffic or rankings will change. Mozscape may have trouble finding links on pages without a lot of links pointing to them, or links hidden under layers of navigation. For more, see this document:
http://www.seomoz.org/help/open-site-explorer-faq
2. Usually Google won't penalize you if your site is down, but if it's down regularly or for an extended period, this could have negative consequences. If you feel your site has suffered because of this, I might suggest submitting a fresh sitemap, or try the "crawl as googlebot" feature as soon as your back up and running. May not do much, but it's worth a shot.
3. Sitelinks - I don't have a definite answer about this, but Google seems to show sitelinks based on user intent, the popularity of your pages, navigation structure, and overall authority. Although Google offers a tool to remove sitelinks, it's pretty hard to influence exactly what they choose to show and when.
Hope this information helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Hi! Thanks for your answers.
So far our site has not dropped in the results for the keywords I tested. The only negative signals found until now are:
-
Dramatic drop in the number of pages indexed, according to google webmaster tools: but not for the pages that are listed in the sitemaps, those were untouched. Drop pages should be mainly duplicated content created by the CMS before we started using canonical tags (not 100% sure which are those dropped pages).
-
Clean up of keywords related to my site. When we installed a new CMS theme for a subsection of our site few months ago, the theme had post "examples", which I overlooked and google indexed those posts very quickly. For a long time I had "lorem ipsum", etc.. as keywords in the webmaster tool list. Now, they are gone, and the real keywords are still there.
I do not know what would happen in the next days with the search results of my good keywords, I hope they mantain their position, or improve it Let`s see...
Thanks again,
Daniel
-
-
I changed servers a few weeks ago and have been 99% dropped from the rankings. I've searched for an answer in many places, a few people said that google does penalise you for a major change in the site like a server change, but only for a few weeks.
So hopefully both our sites will be back to normal in a few weeks. Fingers crossed!
-
Hi,
Google does penalize for site downtime, in its eyes it means your site is not stable but you can recover from it, exact time is possibly a few months, just try to make sure you do not have anymore downtime if you can.
Regarding the OSE and links, it is quite slow to update, if it show you no longer have a link that you know you had, simply go and check on the site to see if it's still there, if it is you don't need to worry, OSE will eventually re-crawl it and find it again.
Site links are a sign that google trusts your site, if your site has big downtime like 1.5 days, it is not exactly a trusted sign for google, so the site links may have been removed for that reason.
All the best
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
-
Linking root domains to your own site
I have been using the moz open site explorer tool and glancing at my competition. I noticed most sites if not all in the linking domains section have a link to there own site. How do i do this? On my site i have no established links and my score is only 1/1. Even with lower ranking sites that have there own site linking to there self have a 16/16. Any help would be appreciated I am pretty new to all of this. thanks
Link Building | | unlimitedairbrush0 -
Is there any data available on how deeplinking contribute to improve domain authority?
Let's say you are collecting backlinks across a variety of pages for foo.com, like: foo.com/clown, foo.com/juggler, foo.com/lion-tamer and so on... Page Authority will benefit for each of those pages, but what is going to happen to Domain Authority? Is there any data available? Any educated guess in what's the best strategy to try to get best results for both PA and DA?
Link Building | | max.favilli1 -
Number of other outgoing links on a page
"If the link pointing to your website is among hundreds or thousands of other outgoing links on
Link Building | | ross254sidney
a single page, then chances are that it isn't as valuable." What is the maximum limit to look for outgoing links before placing our link?0 -
Links on a search page
On search page (listing products) we may have more than one link for the sameproduct : a link on the title of each product a link on each image's product a link on a "buy" button What is the best practice for this ? Link obfuscation? Do nothing special ?
Link Building | | ouicar1 -
How to make google index the page title has changed ?
Google has indexed all my websites, but I have to change some title in the website but when checking google does not update the change.
Link Building | | tuananh0688
Please help me .
My site : http://blog.addme.vn0 -
Classified Sites Ranking on Page 1
How is it that Craigslist, and Backpage get a boost from google and take over 1 or more of the page one results in my niche? Ive also seen people ask a yahoo question, and answer with a link to their website? Are these just temporary boosts?
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Page links vs. domain links
Hello all, I am trying to find out how Google weighs page inbound links vs. domain inbound links. I have a domain with about 100,000 inbound links and am adding a new page to my domain which at this time has 0 links. I will be trying to outrank a competitors page that has 6,000 inbound links to the competitors page, but only has 26,000 inbound links to my competitors domain . Is there a formula or a way to know how Google values a page link vs. a domain link?
Link Building | | digitalops0 -
Value of Linkworthy Resource Pages
Suppose you create a great resource that links to the top 50 blogs in your industry. The blogs in your industry love it and many of them link to that page. How valuable are those inbound links? I would think some factors hurting the value of these links are that they are not pointing to an important page on your site like the home page or main category page, and the 50 links on the page dilutes the linkjuice that is passed back to the homepage. Or is the main value in making the domain's link equity stronger?
Link Building | | SparkplugDigital0