Page authority still on 1 after url change and 301 redirect

[genkee]

Hi Moz analytics suggestion to help ranking is to have a keyword or phrase in the url so I advised a client to do this they changed one of their pages urls, this page previously had a page authority of 26 since the change its gone down to 1.
I advised them that they must do a 301 from the old page but they took a few weeks to do this, would this of affected it why is it not showing up yet its been 3 weeks now, since the 301 and 5 weeks since the url change.

[genkee]

Well thats the odd thing the links to the old page were returning 404 page not found error so that and the very low page authority led me to believe a 301 redirect was needed

[GPainter]

From what you've told me it looks like the following-

example.com/?page?example

renamed to

example.com/keyword-yay

where as a 301 would be good if you had two pages like

example.com/?page?example

then a secondary page was created

example.com/keyword-yay

you could redirect the first into the second, we you've just renamed the page because of this the  301 is not needed and it is a possibility that it may be causing you a problem as your kind of doing this-

example.com/keyword-yay    > 301 > example.com/keyword-yay > 301 > example.com/keyword-yay etc. etc.

the 301 isn't going anywhere but to its own page which is odd!

Wordpress should auto update the pages so if a user comes in for the old link page Wordpress will redirect them to the new one. Having said that if you're not comfortable there is a good plugin - http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

[genkee]

ah right the reason I suggested the 301 to them is after the permalink was changed moz showed its page authority as 1. Will the 301 being on that page do any harm then?

The keyphrase i'm trying to rank them for has a moz keyword difficulty of 44% there domain authority is 29.
Since the tweaks to that page there google ranking has gone from 20 to 23 so its still very low, they were being beaten by sites with  lower domain authority, so i thought after the changes to the page they would have done a lot better by now.

[GPainter]

Hi Genkee,

Majestic SEO use a different metric but in short trust flow is the authority. What it means it Majestic is pick it up fine. I suspect Moz is just being slow updating, the page is fine and Google will see the links it's just Roger taking his time.

If you changed the URL (renamed) you shouldn't need a 301. Its a bit like renaming a word document, it will just take a little while for crawlers to work out its a new page title.

[genkee]

I've just checked the pages source code there's not a  noindex tag and the rel=canonical points to the page.
I checked the 301 from various 301 site checker tools and its reporting working.

The existing url was changed, they use wordpress and it was done using the edit permalink option near the top of the page.

I've just checked Majestic SEO I can't see any option to look at page authority but trust flow is 16 and citation flow is 20

[GPainter]

Hi there Genkee,

Here are a few things to can check:

that you've not got a no index tag or a rel=canonical tag pointing somewhere. The 301 is working correctly.

Rather than create a new URL would it not have been easier to change the existing URL and you wouldn't have as many problems. Have you tried looking in any other programmes like Majestic SEO to see if there is some authority with them and Moz is just being a bit slow with updates?

Lastly I know Moz reports take a month have you had a "fresh" monthly report so there has been a full cycle it may update then. If the 301 is working correctly even if Moz doesn't see the authority it is there it may just be going a bit slow.

Hope you find a tip in there that helps.