Why is my domain authority still 1?
-
I changed the domain of my website from www.vanillacrush.co.uk to www.carissamay.co.uk at the end of December and yet my DA for carissamay is still 1.
As advised, I set up a 301 redirect from VC to CM which seems to be working fine. However when I check on redirect detective it tells me I also have a 302 set up. Could this be confusing things?
http://www.vanillacrush.co.uk
http://www.vanillacrush.co.uk/ 
http://www.carissamay.co.uk 
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Many thanks
-
Thats good to hear
Thank you for sharing the article, I shall have a read now.Carissa
-
Ah yes, that makes sense. Thank you, I will try that out.
I beleive it is set up at the domain level. Is that best? I am not entirely sure how you redirect individual pages.
Thank you very much for your help Jordan.
-
The redirect does help with passing on the link juice. Domain authority is not a Google metric but a Moz metric. Therefore while your DA may have gone down to 1, your hard work isn't lost. All the domain authority does is predict how well your website will rank, it isn't consulted by Google, though.
It doesn't take into consideration any redirects from another domain. But Google does take these types of links into consideration that have been 301 redirected.
Here is an article that may help: https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
Where possible I would also suggest contacting websites to update the link, but you may find that your traffic and rankings won't be as affected as you might fear.
-
I think the mentality behind that is it would be too easy to manipulate. People could just buy expired domains and redirect them to their website. I am going through a similar issue with a website.
I would put your old website through Moz's opensite explorer and identify the backlinks. Then I would reach out to all the domains that linked to your old website and ask them to update the link.
Also, did you do a domain level redirect or redirect each individual page?
That should help you out some.
-
Oh really! My understanding from what I had read online was that if you set up a 301 it will help transfer the majority of your domain authority? Maybe I have misunderstood!.
Is there anything else I can do? It seems a shame to lose all the hard work.
Thank you for your response
-
I think the low domain authority may have something to do with no backlinks to the new domain. From what I have read and experienced domain authority is not transferable. Even though the redirect is in place your new domain does not benefit from the backlinks/authority of the old domain.
What you could do is reach out to websites linking to the old domain and ask them to consider updating their backlinks.
I hope that helps some.
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
-
.co.uk to .com domain move Dec 26th, still 40% down - do I risk moving back? (desperate)
Hi All, I'm desperate for a bit of advice. I run www.tyrereviews.com which has been my project since 2006, and after LOTS of hard work over 15 years held 1000's of P1 positions in the SERPs. I recently moved from the original .co.uk to .com to aid with future internationalising plans. I was very careful not to change ANYTHING else, just 301 from the UK to the .com and updated everything in webmaster consoles. My background is development and I spent weeks triple researching everything to make sure I followed all the google best practices, as this is my life's work and primary income source. From a tech point of view the change went perfectly, but sadly google quickly started deranking the new domain, and now two months on it seems to have stabilised at around 40% down on traffic year on year and mostly dropped from the UK region. This is mostly from medium to long tail keywords. One such example is "Michelin Primacy 4" in google UK, old webmaster tools is showing my average position this time last year as 1.4 and now I'm 12.4! The .com site is geo targeted to the UK by both webmaster tools and href lang tags. So, my question is, so I keep waiting, or do I give up andrisk the switch back to the uk domain before it's too late? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyreReviews0 -
Handling alternate domains
Hi guys, We're noticing a few alternate hostnames for a website rearing their ugly heads in search results and I was wondering how everyone else handles them. For example, we've seen: alt-www.(domain).com test.(domain).com uat.(domain).com We're looking to ensure that these versions all canonical to their live page equivalent and we're adding meta robots noindex nofollow to all pages as an initial measure. Would you recommend a robots.txt crawler exclusion to these too? All feedback welcome! Cheers, Sean
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanginnaw0 -
Low Domain Authority
Hi Our Domain Authority has dropped recently from 29 > 23 - which is really low. I wondered if anyone had any ideas of why this might be? http://www.key.co.uk/en/key I'm seeing ranking/traffic improvements for SEO & I'm not currently building any bad backlinks, I did a sweep to Disavow any bad ones last Oct. I am planning to add good quality links, but is there anything else I can do to improve the authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
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 -
Duplicate content in external domains
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
I have been asking about this case before, but now my question is different.
We have a new school that offers courses and programs . Its website is quite new (just a five months old) It is very common between these schools to publish the courses and programs in training portals to promote those courses and to increase the visibility of them. As the website is really new, I found when I was doing the technical audit, that when I googled a text snipped from the site, the new school website was being omitted, and instead, the course portals are being shown. Of course, I know that the best recommendation would be to create a different content for that purpose, but I would like to explore if there is more options. Most of those portals doesn't allow to place a link to the website in the content and not to mention canonical. Of course most of them are older than the new website and their authority is higher. so,... with this situation, I think the only solution is to create a different content for the website and for the portals.
I was thinking that maybe, If we create the content first in the new website, send it to the index, and wait for google to index it, and then send the content to the portals, maybe we would have more opportunites to not be ommited by Google in search results. What do you think? Thank you!0 -
Using Webmaster Tools to Redirect Domain to Specific Page on Another Domain
Hey Everyone, we redirected an entire domain to a specific URL on another domain (not the homepage). We used a 301 Redirect, but I'm also wondering if I should use the Google Webmaster Tools "Change of Address" section to redirect. There is no option to redirect the old domain to the specific URL on the new domain within the "Change of Address" section. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Domain authority enhancement
Dear all, what is the best way to increase your domain authority in a couple of weeks? Thanks for your reply! Best regards, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HMK-NL0 -
Are sub domains considered completely different than the root domain?
We have a project that is going to generate duplicate content. If we move the new content to a sub-domain (E.g. product.domain.com) will it still be considered duplicate content to the root domain? Or is it like having two completely different domains? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tripled5110