Hello,

That's not correct. I have a feeling that the previous version contained a lot of spammy backlinks and they were part of the index too. We, on the other hand, have claimed backlinks through publications, press releases (the proper way) and never had the feeling we got rewarded for this effort. Competitors had claimed backlinks through linkbuilding campaign by marketing agencies. Their backlink profiles contained a lot of spammy links affecting the DA in a positive way. In my opinion that has changed.

So working hard refers to claiming backlinks as you should by blogging, press releases.

Best regards,

Simon

Hello there,

The metric Domain Authority is calculated in total different way then the previous version, so you should not compare the previous DA with the current one, don't panic. You should interpret this as a relative metric to your competitors. So please check how the DA of your competitors is.

The DA also doesn't infect visibility and rankings in Google, it's only a relative metric. Our website https://www.denhollandsche.nl had a DA of 33 yesterday, we went to 25. Our competitors had a better DA in the previous DA  and today we noticed they went further down than ours.  This also happend at my other site https://www.buydrinks.nl

So as we expected, this feels as a way of justice for our hard work and the new DA seems to be more trustworthy.

Best regards

Simon Janssen

We are using a tag inside our H1 tag to display a second line of text, usually for extra information and making the tag appeal like a intro text for the visitor and not just a optimized SEO tag.

Example: https://www.denhollandsche.nl/grafmonumenten/

Does this technique affect SEO? Should we consider removing it?

Natuursteen grafsteengraniet grafmonument voorbeelden

Dear Devanur, Yiannis,

Thanks a lot for your thorough argumentation on this. There are a few competitors that use the folders in the URL for keyword spamming purposes and I definitely don't want to pursue such a strategy. As the authority is at quite a low level, I prefer optimizing the site structure right now instead of waiting another year. Especially as most pages don't rank to well currently.

Again, thanks a lot for your help guys!

Best regards,

Martijn

Dear Moz members,

There have been many questions on this forum on this topic but I cannot find one that completely answers my question.

We launched our new website about 7 months ago and the website contains around 3.000 product pages. The average page authority of the product pages is quite still quite low (12). The URL structure is built like this: www.website.com/catalog/ID/productname/ (with right keywords in the product name). So e.g the current URL is

Our competitors rank higher on certain keywords while page authority (and DA) are significantly lower. Their URL structure is set up like this: www.website.com/productname/. Our most import keyword is "grafmonumenten" and the link we would like to rank on is: https://www.denhollandsche.nl/grafmonumenten/

My question now is:
1: how important is the length/depth of the URL structure?
2: is it beneficial for us to change the structure (www.website.com/productname/) use permanent redirects? My expierence is that changing the 'page url' can cause a short term drop in the serps, but can have positive effects on the longer term.

Thanks for helping me out!

Thanks Andy! I know what to do now! Let's mark this question as 'answered!'

Ah ok I understand. The old.domain pages indeed are the former www.domain pages and the for each of the old www pages, a redirect to the new www.domain URL is in place in the .htaccess. However, the old www pages are now running on the subdomain old.domain.com and are indexed again by Google and if I now understand correctly, are actually competing with our new domain website that is running on the www.domain.com.

Thanks a lot Tom and Andy. The info is really useful, and as the html code and structure of the pages is a lot better than from the old site, there is nothing else that I could think of that is causing our positions to drop...

There is one part I do not fully understand:

"is the new website structure sat on top of old urls which are redirected to the new site or old site?"

Could you explain what you mean by this?

Thanks again for your help!

Dear all,

I tried to find this question using the search option but cannot find the exact same problem.

This is the thing: I launched a new website in January, replacing our old website that did pretty good in the SERPs. The old website is still running on a subdomain old.website.com and the new website is on www.website.com (www.denhollandsche.nl)

Both sites are indexed by google right now, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing. For our main keyword, the page on the new website has an authority of "23" and the exact same page (some minor differences) on the old website still has an authority of "30". Both currently are on the second page of google while some time ago, they where still on position 2/3/4.

My question is: if I would take down the old website and make a 301 redirect for the old page with P/A 30, to point to the new page with a P/A 23, will the p/a of this new page take over the P/A of the old page? What effects can I expect?

The reason the old website is still running is that google images still shows images from old.domain.com in stead of images from the new website...

Thanks for your help guys!

Hello there,

The metric Domain Authority is calculated in total different way then the previous version, so you should not compare the previous DA with the current one, don't panic. You should interpret this as a relative metric to your competitors. So please check how the DA of your competitors is.

The DA also doesn't infect visibility and rankings in Google, it's only a relative metric. Our website https://www.denhollandsche.nl had a DA of 33 yesterday, we went to 25. Our competitors had a better DA in the previous DA  and today we noticed they went further down than ours.  This also happend at my other site https://www.buydrinks.nl

So as we expected, this feels as a way of justice for our hard work and the new DA seems to be more trustworthy.

Best regards

Simon Janssen

Hello,

That's not correct. I have a feeling that the previous version contained a lot of spammy backlinks and they were part of the index too. We, on the other hand, have claimed backlinks through publications, press releases (the proper way) and never had the feeling we got rewarded for this effort. Competitors had claimed backlinks through linkbuilding campaign by marketing agencies. Their backlink profiles contained a lot of spammy links affecting the DA in a positive way. In my opinion that has changed.

So working hard refers to claiming backlinks as you should by blogging, press releases.

Best regards,

Simon