Domain Authority and Page Authority down - Change of Server

[te_c]

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

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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!

[te_c]

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

[zpeti]

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!

[Andropenis_Australia]

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