I think I also asked this within the comments section of the Moz Blog, but could you expand on some of the technical challenges of permitting "historical" DA?

Now that it has been updated/reset, surely now is the perfect time to start "when records began".

I'm assuming there's lots of us out that that have no record of old DA anywhere as we never really exported it but nevertheless would like to know or reminisce about the growth of our sites

Hi Bek,

The short answer is that updating meta descriptions will have zero impact directly on how well these pages rank, however a more compelling meta description combined with a pretty URL and a decent title tag will help boost click-thru-rate (CTR).

CTR as a ranking factor is the latest Google Conspiracy theories amongst SEOs. Google denies they use SERP data however a lot of professional (including I believe Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz) disagree with this assertion based on their experiences...

So basically updating metas could have an indirect benefit for ranking, but mostly there will be zero impact and thus wouldn't be worth prioritizing over high-impact SEO activities.

If you had to update some, I'f urge that you evaluate which pages already rank on the first page and prioritize them for the best chance of a direct impact.

Or again if you have limited time, just focus on the title tags themselves. These will have the biggest impact!

More Info: https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

I hope this sort of helps and puts you on the right path,

Nick

I know Moz is transparent so this would have been documented somewhere but I totally didn't know this/forgot!

Hi Simon,

Quick question which I think I can guess the answer, does the current canonical page rank for anything at all?

Can't the developers make the canonical a static page (which currently redirects) default to the most popular and or a vanilla combination of product attributes?

That would of course be the best option, failing that you would have to just canonicalise to the most popular product variation and do so in a way that doesn't create a redirect chain.

I literally just referenced SiteBulb in another post, and I don't want to come across like a shill but there's a great explanation of it your issue here: https://sitebulb.com/hints/indexability/canonical-hints/canonical-points-to-a-redirecting-url/

Easier said than done for sure with some CMS and E-Commerce sites, but as the aforementioned link says...it's generally dealt with on a case by case basis.

Appreciate this is isn't a definitive answer but I hope it helps!

Nick

Great answer Alex!

I'm not too familiar with ASP and the CMS which powers your website but if it is a case of hardcoded reference, it's definitely worth asking a developer if they can run "a bulk find and replace."

As Alex says, using relative links is preferred these days but a quick but if your developer doesn't feel up to it or doesn't want to dabble in too much regex, what I said should be a quick and dirty solution.

Good luck!

Nick

Interesting development which may be of interest to you Ernst:

Google admitted just the other day that they "haven't supported rel=next/prev for years." https://searchengineland.com/google-apologizes-for-relnext-prev-mixup-314494

"Should you remove the markup? Probably not. Google has communicated this morning in a video hangout that while it may not use rel=next/prev for search, it can still be used by other search engines and by browsers, among other reasons. So while Google may not use it for search indexing, rel=prev/next can still be useful for users. Specifically some browsers might use those annotations for things like prefetching and accessibility purposes."