Why the rapid drop in Domain Authority?
-
I couple weeks ago I switched my website from Drupal to a Wordpress CMS: Martial Arts Austin My rankings have remained the same, but the Domain Authority has plummeted from like 29 to 21. I know this is small fry, but I don't want my business to drop in ranking.
The URL's were kept exactly the same, with the internal links and copy also kept the same with few additions.
Also, according to Open Site Explorer, the site's stronger pages have now averaged out with the weaker and unused pages so they all now share the same Page Authority - that doesn't seem right. Is there reason for concern?
Did I screw something up, or am I making too much of this?
Thanks
-
There is one other possibility and that would be the "canonical redirect." If your site is PMA (only one I saw with PA 21 in serps), when you put www.yourdomain.com in you get a page auth of 33 to go with your DA 21. But, when you put in the root without the www, ( yourdomain.com ) you get a PA of 18 and your linking root domains drop a bit.... from 42 to 1.
In WordPress, with any of the SEO plugins we have used (All in one, Genesis, etc), the canonical redirect does not happen. You have to do it in the .htaccess file. There are plenty of good directions for how to: query .htaccess redirects. Or, there are several gurus around moz who can post directions here.....
(I'm not one)My guess is that when you do this, you will see a change in short time (few weeks at most).
-
Hi Steve.
The most likely cause of your DA drop is some URLs from the old site no longer exist on the new site. Something was missed.
The easiest way to test this theory is to compare a list of your backlink profile from the old site with the backlink profile of the new site. If you didn't track your backlinks in the past, then I suggest you start now as it is a good tool to help troubleshooting this type of issue. A few other items to check out:
-
Did you use any 302 redirects? If so, that is an issue as the link value does not flow when a 302 is used.
-
Did you remove ANY pages from your site during the CMS migration? If so, those pages may have had links which contributed to your site's overall DA.
-
It's also possible a site which linked to you previously decided to remove the link at the same time as the CMS change.
I tried to look at your site and noticed it is redirected to http://www.meetup.com/pmaustin/. Your site is a martial arts site where this is a project management site. Something seems wrong.
-
-
There was an update to Open Site Explorer on September 13th that might account for the change in domain authority, and it may well be that your DA would have had the same change even if you hadn't touched your site. Here's a blog post from Rand about the latest OSE update: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-september-update-feedback.
Having the same PA across all of the pages doesn't sound right. For that, I'd send an email to the help desk at help@seomoz.org and let them know about it.
I'd say don't panic just yet!
Keri
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
-
Purchased domain with links - redirect page by page or entire domain?
Hi, I purchased an old domain with a lot of links that I'm redirecting to my site. I want all of their links to redirect to the same page on my site so I can approach this two different ways: Entire site
Technical SEO | | ninel_P
1.) RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com or Page by page
2). Redirect 301 /retiredpage.html http://www.xyz.com/newpage.html Is there a better option I should go with in regards to SEO effectiveness? Thanks in advance!0 -
Move from 4 Domains to 1
Hey Moz Community We are running 4 domains at the moment. www.rapturecamps.com www.surfcamp.travel www.surfcampbali.com www.surfcampinportugal.com We started of our business with 1. after a view years in business we got the option to buy the other 3 domains which have ranked quite well with certain keywords. As its quite allot of work maintaining all these websites with two languages, we where thinking of actually moving number 2, 3 ,4 all to number 1. All domains receive still some good rankings as well as daily hits. So we kinda like would like to keep the SEO Juice. Therefore we where researching for some time what would be the best practice todo so. For us there are two possible options We go trough all posts/pages on the domain 2,3,4 and copy the content over to domain 1. After thats done we create 301 redirects on the domains 2,3,4 linking them back to domain 1 posts/pages. We do do so by manually adding the 301's into the htaccess file, so we are able to delete the Wordpress installations. Our we just copy the Pages/Posts from the domains 2,3,4 to the domain 1 and then kill the 2,3,4 domains afterwords, and let google index these Pages/Posts on the new domain. This way we think we would loose the whole SEO Juice from the old domains. The reason we are asking this one here, we have been reading that this method could lead to red flags at google if we redirect to much Pages/Post back to Domain 1. Hopefully someone here can help us answer that question.
Technical SEO | | 5Gates0 -
New site: More pages for usability, or fewer more detailed pages for greater domain authority flow?
Ladies and gents! We're building a new site. We have a list of 28 professions, and we're wondering whether or not to include them all on one long and detailed page, or to keep them on their own separate pages. Thinking about the flow of domain authority - I could see 28 pages diluting it quite heavily - but at the same time, I think having the separate pages would be better for the user. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap1 -
If a permanent redirect is supposed to transfer SEO from the old page to the new page, why has my domain authority been impacted?
For example, we redirected our old domain to a new one (leaving no duplicate content on the old domain) and saw a 40% decrease in domain authority. Isn't a permanent redirect supposed to transfer link authority to the place it is redirecting to? Did I do something wrong?
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Domain Aliases
Hi there, I've got two sites mysite.com and mysite.org .org is indexed by google, .com doesnt seem to be. .com is used for some material that is sent out, and accounts for about 20% of incoming visotors. (80% end up on .org) Is there any positive or negative effect from this? Would I benefit from 301'ing the .com to .org?
Technical SEO | | dencreative0 -
Page Rank 7 - Domain Authority of 6 (How does this happen)
Iv never seen this before, but what do you guys make of this? http://www.becitywise.com/ According to Google, its a PR7 website. SEOMOZ are reporting a DA of 6 (1 link to the domain) http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php Any thoughts as to how or why Google have assigned such a high PR? According to Whois, the domain was registered on 16/07/12 so its brand new... The funny thing is, many people purchase links based on the Page Rank, so this guy must be making a fortune. (the Friends links I assume are all paid links) Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0 -
Domain.com and domain.com/ redirect(error)
When I view my campaign report I'm seeing duplicate content/ meta for mydomain.com and mydomain.com/ (with a slash) I already applied a 301 redirect as follows: redirect 301 /index.php/ /index.php Where am I messing up here?
Technical SEO | | cgman0 -
Subfolder to Root Domain, Should i or not?
Dear All, I am kinda of stuck and need your helps, I have major client's site which is located in subdirectory. Instance: http://www.majorclient.com.cn/cn/ and as you can see domain name is already localized and they are not planning to make any english version of the site, So there will be no /eng/ folder but clients whole website is /cn/ subdirectory which is totally unnecessary and i would like to 301 whole site to **http://www.majorclient.com.cn ** But the problem is that this site has been /cn/ folder forever since the beginning and lot of trusted links are pointing to www.majorclient.com.cn/cn/ So should i move it or just configure 301 www.majorclient.com.cn to www.majorclient.com.cn/cn/ leave it there and don't bother. Help?
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0
