Dreamrealemedia,

Use the Enable Media Replace plugin by Måns Jonasson. It will swap out the old image for the new, update all your links, and you'll be good to go. No 404 errors.

Bright Local just released a new (free) tool you can use to specify a location and search term and see Google or Google Local results.  You can specify city, state or ZIP. Seems to work pretty well.

https://www.brightlocal.com/local-search-results-checker/

It's a personal choice but I don't see any harm in leaving it activated. I think there's more of a risk that tables will get corrupted if you are periodically deactivating and reactivating but that's just my opinion. If it's a concern, you would be better off posing your question to the plugin author.

Please share if you identify any good ones. I know I'm interested and expect others would be as well. Brest question!

And even then, you have to be careful because Google lies by omission. Rand explains in this Moz Blog post dated February 14, 2012.

Are you using the yoast SEO plugin? There is a setting under Advanced > Permalinks that forces a trailing slash onto URLs. I'd try looking at that first.

Putting a range around the DAs where fluctuations will be most felt (10-40), helps and makes sense, but I also saw 3-15 point differences in DA this update at the higher end of the scale.

Totally agree Bryan.

Hi there Sika,

As Ryan says, it's normal to see fluctuations in domain authority and the number of links each new update. That's because the sample size and sources fluctuate from update to update. I'd worry if I saw this pattern continue over several updates or if I saw warnings in Google Webmaster Tools.

Domain authority and link quantities also naturally end to diminish over time unless you're making an effort to bolster and sustain them. That means you need a strategy and plan to continue to grow inbound links from authoritative sources to your site. If you're not doing that, you should be.

Have you really lost links, or is it an outcome of the sampling? To answer that question you'd need to have a baseline of the number of inbound links to your site from a variety of sources including Moz and maybe Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO or Ahrefs, and a few others. Then you'd need to compare your baseline to whatever you have today. Just remember none of the tools are perfect. They all sample rather than inventory, so you're just checking for patterns.

Hope that helps.

I see everyone's responses and understand that DA is based on a variety of factors, but I also agree that a domain authority of 26 seems unusually high for this site.

Majestic reports a Trust Flow of 0 and Citation Flow of 31 and 35 incoming links from 8 different sources, both of which would lend me to expect a lower domain authority for this site. That said, a couple of the recently discovered incoming links are coming from powerful sources, most notably:

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-us-publishers-owe-china/2015/05/26/0b100ff8-02fd-11e5-bc72-f3e16bf50bb6_story.html?utm_term=.1ad4d52de865; and
• http://blog.livedoor.jp/takemiya31/archives/51761738.html

It's possible Moz found these links and just isn't displaying them in Open Site Explorer.

It's not unusual to see dramatic fluctuations in DA when a site has few incoming links. If it was me, I'd wait to see what the next API update reports before concluding real progress has been made. Did you bump up the volume of content on the site recently?

It sounds like it might be a theme setting. Some themes come with their own baked-in SEO functionality that can be turned off or on. I'd check that first.

Edited now that I've seen Patrick's response which I agree with and want to elaborate on a bit.

"... if an external site has more than one link going to your site, then it is only the one link that passes value. " There has been some discussion of that point in the past. This is the most recent I found and I believe it is still accurate.

Moz best practices for anchor text also touch on your point.

1. Yes, but it the anchor text of the first link that will count most.

_2) _Yes, because the link destinations are different.

3) It's possible those links will boost rankings indirectly IF they provide sticky traffic, not not by virtual of the links themselves. Sticky traffic is traffic that doesn't bounce.