Domain Authority
-
Hi
I wanted to find out if anyone knew how to discover why DA may have dropped? Ours has gone from 26 to 25 - I know it's not much, but I wanted to find the reason.
One thing which happened was our developer company wiped redirects, which did impact rankings - would this also have affected domain authority or do I need to review our backlinks again?
Thank you
-
Thought so! Thank you for the feedback
-
That's definitely long enough for search engines (and Moz DA) to notice and react accordingly. Best of luck to you in your climb back up!
-
They were down from 27th November to 24th December.
The issue with our redirects came from our entire web catalogue being deleted - another glitch when developers were working on something unrelated.
So between 27th Nov - 30th Nov the whole website apart from the homepage was pretty much gone.
Pretty big issues, which will take some time to rectify.
Thank you
-
How long were the redirects down? Were there any other site changes that occurred around the time of the DA drp?
-
Hi Logan,
Thank you for the reply.
These weren't removed intentionally and have been put back as they were. However I'm just concerned about the fall out from this.
The issue was that rather than redirecting, they had removed 301's so the new URL was a 404 and the URLs reverted back to their old structure.
We shouldn't have lost any backlinks, I wasn't sure if it could be something else
Thanks!
-
When you remove redirects, you also effectively remove any links pointing to your site that pass through those redirects. For this reason, it's not usually recommended that redirects are removed. Something I do to track which redirects are actually being hit, is adding source/medium UTMs to the resolving URL of my redirects - see example below. This pushes data into Google Analytics and allows me to see which redirects I don't need (i.e., if they don't show up in GA reports after a specified time frame), and which ones are still active.
Example of 301 redirect with source/medium UTMs:/my-old-URL >>> /my-new-URL?utm_source=/my-old-URL&utm_medium=301
That being said, if you had some high quality links passing through any of those redirects, it could certainly cause a drop in DA.
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
-
Why some domains and sub-domains have same DA, but some others don't?
Hi I noticed for some blog providers in my country, which provide a sub-domian address for their blogs. the sub-domain authority is exactly as the main domain. Whereas, for some other blog providers every subdomain has its different and lower authority. for example "ffff.blog.ir" and "blog.ir" both have domain authority of 60. It noteworthy to mention that the "ffff.blog.ir" does not even exist! This is while mihanblog.com and hfilm.mihanblog.com has diffrent page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayatarh5451230 -
New domain or subdirectory?
I noticed my domain authority has dropped slightly in the recent update, and it has me re-thinking a strategy for a website I just recently launched. I purchased the domain name kansasisbeautiful.com about a year ago and have been working on building it for most of that time. Earlier in August, I went ahead and launched it. However, towards the end of the development of the website, I decided to just put it in a subdirectory of my parent company (my photography business) at mickeyshannon.com/kansas and redirected the kansasisbeautiful.com domain to the subdirectory. mickeyshannon.com is my photography business website. The Kansas website has it's own distinct design, but is powered completely by my photography. I created it for a few purposes, including promoting tourism to the state of Kansas and to publish a book on Kansas travel next year, but one of it's main goals is also to help sell my photography prints. I decided to put it in a subdirectory (mickeyshannon.com/kansas) as I had hoped it might drive more traffic into buying photo prints if it lived on my main website. However, I've been re-thinking my strategy and have been wondering if I'm competing against myself too much. Many of my photography prints have the name of a location in them and have their own URL per photo (for example: "Flint Hills Spring Sunrise" is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com/photo/flint-hills-spring-sunset/). It makes me wonder if the new Kansas travel website page for the Flint Hills (http://www.mickeyshannon.com/kansas/flint-hills/) is competing for that keyword. Would I be better moving mickeyshannon.com/kansas to kansasisbeautiful.com? I was worried having so many backlinks back to my photography site would send up red flags with Google as if the kansasisbeautiful.com website was just a spammy website created to push traffic to mickeyshannon.com when it really has it's own purpose. Any thoughts on whether using the domain name or keeping it at the subdomain level is better? Hopefully that made sense. Thanks, Mickey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VSphoto0 -
Legacy domains
Hi all, A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well. Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was? Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com. What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains? Many thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarkovitch0 -
Which Domain is better
Which domain is better for SEO. vehiclewrapslasvegasnv.com Or vehicle-wraps-lasvegas-nv.com Thanks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
XML Sitemap on another domain
Hi, We've rebuilt our website and created a better sitemap index structure. There's a good chance that we not be able to append the XML files to existing site for technical reasons (don't get me started). I'm reaching out because I'm wondering if can we place the XML files on another website or subdomain? I know this is not best practice and probably very grey but I'm looking for alternatives. If there answer is DON'T DO IT let me know too. Thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
Should I 301 a penalized domain to another domains subfolder?
I have a niche domain seems to have been hit by Penguin. It had very good rankings before the update, and I think at least a good part of the penalty might be due to overoptimized anchor text. So here is the question; If I decide to take this site down, should I 301 the entire domain to a relevant sub-folder of another site? i.e comtemporaryfurniture.com to domain.com/category/modern-furniture.html Will the penalty get passed onto the new domain? If the penalty is partly due to anchor text, then pointing it to another site's subfolder would mean the tartget URL has more varied anchor text and could boost rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Redirecting Powerful Domains
What do you do if you have a client that never implemented a 301 redirect on their domain? For example here are the OSE stats for the URLs; http://url.com PA: 48 DA: 50 LRD: 65 TL: 1,084 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 http://www.url.com PA: 51 DA: 50 LRD: 165 TL: 2,271 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 G+1:3 My first instincts are to redirect the first one to the second one, but is it too late for that? Will that screw up all of their established stats? Any input or examples of past experiences with this would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Understanding Canocalization, domain structure, redirects
Hey guys, My background is more in marketing aspect of SEO and I'm afraid my technical knowledge is not where it should be. I'm confused about how to find out whether a site is splitting link juice by having to many domains(?) that are not redirected properly. Am I asking that right? How do you figure that out? And, once you know, do you just go to the ones that are not redirecting and add a 301? Where is the best place to add a 301? I know there's a difference in the eyes of the search engines between, say, example.com and www.example.com and probably other forms, correct? I'm not a programmer or IT specialist, I'm a marketing consultant, but I feel like I'm really missing it when it comes to understanding all this stuff (looking at HTTP headers, using GWT, reading source code, etc) and am not sure the best way to learn it effectively so I can be sure I'm not missing something when consulting with clients. Help? Please? Thanks, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidPPeters0