Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi VTMOZ

First of all, remember that the MOZ scores are not used by Google.

All MOZ scores from SPAM score, to PA and DA are arbitrary scores used by MOZ to allow you to compare your website to other websites. Even then they are really only useful when comparing against websites in the same niche.

Yes the scores given by MOZ are useful as a measure to see progress, but I repeat they are not used by Google.

If you have a number of bad backlinks and you think that Google is penalising your rankings because of these links then feel free to disavow them. I would suggest that you make sure you are only going to disavow bad links though.

Again keep in mind that Google seems to be getting better at realising links from certain types of sites are Spammy and ignoring them.

When building backlinks you should always use a natural approach that means your site will gain and lose backlinks at a sustainable rate and you should never pay for backlinks.

I hope this helps

Steve

Hi ResultfirstGA,

You are correct thepeoppeople.com is not registered on google.

Also, peopeople.com is only showing 2 pages on a site search as well.

The redirect is working correctly for the root domain.

I took a look at your robots.txt and sitemap.xml and they look ok. Have you checked your .htaccess to make sure it isn't blocking any traffic?

Also, check you are not meta noindexing on the page.

Have you checked Search Console for any errors?

Is search console showing any errors?

Here are some links that may help

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/definitive-list-reasons-google-isnt-indexing-site/118245/#close

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7474347?hl=en

Let me know how you get on

Steve

https://neilpatel.com/blog/google-index/

Hi Caroline,

Recommendations would be to do as you have suggested review keywords, & pages.

Make sure you have a robust About us section that proves you are experts, look to introduce new high quality and relevant content.

Start actively searching for relevant and quality backlinks.

Steve

Hi Caroline,

thanks for the response. It appears that you haven't made any changes that would have this sort of impact.

You have checked everything I would look at and found nothing to show that the site may be "broken" which is good.

Here are some links which show minor changes around the dates you have asked about, take a look and see if they may relate to your site. If they do please let us know. If not again let us know and we can keep on investigating.

https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-update-valentines/293451/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-february-march-2019-updates/297493/#close

https://www.thewebmaster.com/google-updates/google-update-12-february-2019/

https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-27077.html

Hopefully this will help you.

If not as I say let me know.

Steve

Hi Jason,

From the sounds of it, you have done nothing to cause the change.

As Donna has said there may have been a minor update which has impacted you.

Have a look at the resources Donna has shared and let us know if you think they are not the cause.

Steve

A tool like MOZ or SEMRush will show you where the backlinks were pointing or you may notice a difference in the page rank or traffic to a page if it lost a valuable link.

If the links all look to be of low quality I wouldnt worry to much if you have a good overall link profile. But I would keep monitoring to make sure it is not a trend that is going to continue.

https://blog.pagezii.com/how-to-check-backlinks-in-google-analytics/

The above link may also help. You may need to add a secondary dimension of landing page. Sorry brain not working quite right its been a long day.

Hi again,

I have just checked and you have a redirect chain which is not good.

Status Code URL IP Page Type Redirect Type Redirect URL
301 http://blog.example.com/  server_redirect permanent https://blog.humankinetics.com/
301 https://blog.example.com/  server_redirect permanent https://humankinetics.me/
200 https://example.com/  normal none none

I have removed any identifying data but trust me it's from your link.

I would work to get the 301 pointing straight from both the first two links to the third so there is no extra step in the middle required.

and now back to your original questions.

Did the links I provided earlier help with the UTM question?

As for adding DA/PA to your blog have you seen any increase since you made the change? You may get some from it but as I said earlier I don't think you will get much. Monitoring is the only way you will know for sure.

Hi Jason,

We have a similar question here

https://moz.com/community/q/did-any-one-else-notice-rankings-drops-since-14th-21st-feb-this-year

I have posted some questions in two posts, the main ones are copied below:

Some things to check

1. Did you make any significant changes to the site - implementing HTTPS for instance
2. Has someone changed your sitemap, robots.txt or htaccess files
3. Are you having redirect issues?
4. Are you getting more 4xx errors in Google analytics
5. When you look at Google Analytics is there any particular traffic source or keyword that has suddenly dropped or is it roughly the same across the board?

The above are all worth considering.

Looking at the graph you posted your traffic/views looks quite volatile normally. Is the rest of the graph going back over time like this?

Did anything of note happen in your industry on that day or before?

You mention that your tracking software isn't showing the same results what is it showing? Also, what is Google Analytics showing for the same day?

What is your industry? if you can share

Steve

Without seeing the data it is hard to say.

If you have a few years of data take a look back and see what fluctuations you have had previously.

Also, check the pages that the links were pointing to on your site make sure they haven't been removed.

If its a small number of links compared to your overall backlink profile then I wouldn't worry to much if its a big percentage of your overall backlink profile then I would be digging into it to see if you can stop it.

Is there any pattern to the links as I asked in my first response? are they all from one type of site? do they all link to old content?

There could be any number of reasons for this.

The domains linking to you are clearing up old content and removing it from their site if they no longer see it as valid or valuable.

The domain linking to you is clearing out links that point to your content as they feel there is better content to link to now.

Old domains disappearing off the web completely

For a more specific answer you  will need to provide us with more info, such as how old are the links, are they all from one type of websites such as directories or blog sites

Steve

Hi,

The first thing to remember, Google rankings do not use MOZ DA or PA to decide where a website should be ranked in the results.

The best way to use DA and PA are as an arbitrary measurement that allows you to compare against other sites, so you can see how you are doing against your competitors.

Now without knowing the URLs involved, I cannot check the websites to give any real insights. However, there is any number of reasons why the other sites may be ranking higher than your clients.

They may have better content for the keyword. They may have more backlinks pointing to the domain, they may be answering questions regarding that keyword in more detail.

Without actually being able to compare the sites it is hard to say.

I would analyse the sites that are higher than yours, check the backlink profiles, compare the number of pages and compare the quality of the content then you should have a plan to move forward and improve your rankings.

I hope this helps,

Steve

Hi Niaokun,

First, of Disavow the spammy links will help with how Google sees your website.

But to reduce your spam score on MOZ etc... you will need to contact the sites that have links you want removing and ask them to remove them. This can be time-consuming and doesn't always have a high success rate.

No MOZ and Google do not share data.

I hope this helps

Steve

Hi Luke,

Moz Pro has a good backlinks tool.  https://moz.com/products/pro

Also, Ahrefs has a pretty substantial backlinks tools https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker

As does Majestic https://majestic.com

For free tools you can use SEO Powersuite which you can run locally on your PC. I would make sure you check the settings on this though and read the user guide. It is a pretty powerful suite of tools. https://www.uk.link-assistant.com/features-and-editions.html

The hoth also lets you check your backlinks for free, this is powered by Ahrefs I think. https://www.thehoth.com/backlinks-checker/

I hope this helps.

Hi hangnga,

The algorithm that MOZ uses to calculate the domain authority was updated on the 5th March.

This means that potentially all websites have new DA scores.

Here are some links that may be useful

https://moz.com/community/q/a-new-and-improved-domain-authority-is-on-the-way

https://moz.com/domain-authority-2.0

Also it is worth remembering that DA is an arbitrary measure, that is it makes sense to use it to compare against your competitors, but not against sites in different categories necessarily.

It can also be used to track your progress over time as a score given to you by MOZ.

It does not affect your Google SERPs

I hope this helps.

Hi,

It depends, if the links are topical and flow naturally in the content then they should help.

If they are spammy and not related at all to the content, then I would think they will be ignored at best.

Internal links help show Google etc. which pages you believe to be the most important on your site, that doesn't mean you should include lots of spammy links on your pages though.

More internal links pointing to a page that is topical and relevant to the content is the best way.

Steve

There could be any number of reasons for this.

The domains linking to you are clearing up old content and removing it from their site if they no longer see it as valid or valuable.

The domain linking to you is clearing out links that point to your content as they feel there is better content to link to now.

Old domains disappearing off the web completely

For a more specific answer you  will need to provide us with more info, such as how old are the links, are they all from one type of websites such as directories or blog sites

Steve

You are more than welcome.

I know I really enjoy answering questions on here and I suspect that EffectDigital does as well.

Please do let us know how you get on either directly or by replying to this post, that is one thing that is lacking when we respond to questions on any forum. People don't always let us know the results of our answers.

I wish you all the best working with what sounds to be a good client and hope to see more of you on the forums.

Steve

Hi Ben,

Have you tried increasing the font size? It may sound daft but normally the obvious is the simple answer.

Most CMS have an easy option to change the font size across the whole website and you can test it to make sure it does not have an adverse effect on larger screens.

The other point that springs to mind is to make sure you don't have any really small text on the page, check your footer for one, but also if the domain has spammy text hidden with really small text size that won't help.

It might help if you could share the text size you are using if none o the above help.

Steve

I'm not aware of a way to remove keywords in MOZ directly, but you could always export to csv and filter it there.

Or it may be that all or the majority of these keywords have a low difficulty if they are based on a brand or product name and you can filter them out that way. Just keep in mind that you may loose some good ideas by doing that.

Thanks EffectDigital,

Again your answer takes it to a new level though and provides great insights.