When "pruning" old content, is it normal to see an drop in Domain Authority on Moz crawl report?
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After reading several posts about the benefits of pruning old, irrelevant content, I went through a content audit exercise to kick off the year. The biggest category of changes so far has been to noindex + remove from sitemap a number of blog posts from 2015/2016 (which were very time-specific, i.e. software release details).
I assigned many of the old posts a new canonical URL pointing to the parent category. I realize it'd be ideal to point to a more relevant/current blog post, but could this be where I've gone wrong?
Another big change was to hide the old posts from the archive pages on the blog.
Any advice/experience from anyone doing something similar much appreciated! Would be good to be reassured I'm on the right track and a slight drop is nothing to worry about.
If anyone is interested in having a look:
- https://vivaldi.com
- https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots [this is the category where changes have been made, primarily]
- https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots/keyboard-shortcut-editing/ [example of a pruned post]
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Someone from Moz will probably give better insights but the DA metric may not be impacted by your change but rather the update to the tracking index from Moz. If you read into the DA metric they provide I believe it is relative to their index and will fluctuate based on data they hold - primarily about links and site quality as a whole.
I'd be surprised if pruning your content put you in a place where DA was negatively impacted as a direct result.
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