Welcome to the Q&A Forum

hahaha.. Im not afraid of hard work, I know it's not the most glamorous job but I am obviously quite happy about it, I worked hard building up the SEO of all my pages on the old site, just a bit naive not to know the answer to that one already but that's why I am here. to get help from the best out there.

thanks again and best of luck

regards

Wes Dunn

Thanks Microdesign to be honest I have only just thought about checking into it as I only performed the upgrade a few weeks ago, I thought Moz may give me some indication when it does the weekly crawl on my site but the only errors that have come back are smaller issues like a few duplicate titles or missing Meta Description for pages that are not majorly important.

Thanks for the reply, I have a list of all the URL's so I will go to work

regards

Wes Dunn

Hiya Moz Community

I hope you are all great, I have a question regarding one of my websites, I have the main site and 2 sub folder sites essentially, I decided to upgrade one of the sites and placed it in a different sub folder, I then set up a 301 redirect to the new location, so far so good, I have been having a look at my  link profile using AHrefs, inside there is an SEO report facility, I ran the report and I have over 500 pages returning a 403 or Forbidden error. my question is whether the Equity from those pages is being passed to the new site?

I actually removed all the old site from Google Cache to avoid misleading visitors, I suppose I could set the re-directs up manually if I the equity is not being passed to the new site although I was under the impression it would be, or 85% - 90% of it would be anyway.

The reason why I am asking is that I have seen a significant drop in rankings for keywords that my site has always ranked highly for. thought I would see if you guys can clear that up for me.

Thanks and regards

Wes Dunn

Hi Thomas

Thanks a lot, I have read this article briefly before but I need to put some proper time aside to really absorb it, I'm always optimistic and have a background in IT Training so it's in my nature to want to help others improve, The SEO world is so vast, it's great to know there are so many talented SEO's here for me to learn from and hopefully pass what I have learnt down to others.

I will definitely do the Youmoz when I have a little free time, I would love to get some feedback from you and others and the community so stay tuned

Thanks again for your support, it means a great deal

Best regards

Wes Dunn

I agree with both responses, I would like to add my experience to the mix, my site decreased in Domain Authority and Page Authority due to the loss of a few sites that were no longer linking in a few months ago, my site is relatively new and the Domain Authority went from 20 to 18, it has since increased to 19 after a few new sites linked in so that could well be the reason for your DA drop, I am not aware of any recent Google Updates but I do know that my Moz DA was updated a few days ago so that may coincide with your recent drop, I am not sure how often Google updates the link data in GWT so it may vary from what you see in OSE and Majestic SEO, as Chris says, the historical link option for Majestic SEO is very handy and the data seems to be updated quite frequently also.

Hope this helps

Hi Thomas

I appreciate you taking the time to reply, as far I know I was never manually penalized, I used a tool called Fruition to identify if my old site had been affected by any google updates, in most cases my site was affected negatively, to be honest I have still not worked out the best way to build links other than to write high quality content that s worthy of "Earning" links. looking around at the competition there is no doubt in my mind that most are buying links from higher authority domains in order to boost their page rank and domain authority etc.

I have decided not to try and push any of the old rank to the new site via a 301, it just seems a shame that all the hard work will go to waste really, but at least I have learned from the experience.:-)

I will take another look at YouMoz, Ive never been afraid of telling people about things I have done particularly badly, Equally Im happy to broadcast something I have done quite well, it makes for better reading when you read about someone misfortunes though so I could probably patent it and turn it into a worldwide smash, "The SEO Woes of Wes" has a nice ring to it..

Thanks and best regards Thomas

Wes Dunn

Hi Matt

Thanks alot for the reply, there is nothing really wrong with the domain concerning links etc as far as I know, I just made a bit of a mess of the site by changing, category bases, taxonomy names, posts types etc, you are right about the wonderful world of SEO, It has been a frustrating year or so learning by my mistakes but very rewarding as my knowledge and skills improve, I am very grateful to everyone here for that and the Moz Pro tools has been a massive help also.

My old domain seemed to incur 2 penalties due to penguin updates but I just put that down to the mess I had made really, duplicate content was possibly a reason as I had no incline about cannonicalization and the changes I made duplicated just about everything multiple times, If Google issues penalties for providing a poor user experience then I probably got hit with a few of those also.. I could write several pages about bad mistakes I have made previously but so far Ive never had a Manual Action message or anything from Google to indicate Ive really messed up....

Thanks again for the reply, the new site is in much better shape than the old one ever was so perhaps it's best not to try and cut any corners

regards

Wes Dunn

Hi All

First question here so go easy.. I have a property site which is working well so far considering it;s early days, unfortunately some of my earlier efforts did not go so well and one in particular I pretty much destroyed in my attempts to improve the site SEO. Lucky enough my SEO skills have improved quite a bit lately, largely thanks to the great tools, tutorials and experts here at Moz

My question is whether I can use a 301 redirect to pass the domain authority and any link equity from an unused site to the one that ive done a better job on? it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy...

Thanks everyone and thanks for all the help over the last 6 months or so..

Wes Dunn

Hi Thomas

I appreciate you taking the time to reply, as far I know I was never manually penalized, I used a tool called Fruition to identify if my old site had been affected by any google updates, in most cases my site was affected negatively, to be honest I have still not worked out the best way to build links other than to write high quality content that s worthy of "Earning" links. looking around at the competition there is no doubt in my mind that most are buying links from higher authority domains in order to boost their page rank and domain authority etc.

I have decided not to try and push any of the old rank to the new site via a 301, it just seems a shame that all the hard work will go to waste really, but at least I have learned from the experience.:-)

I will take another look at YouMoz, Ive never been afraid of telling people about things I have done particularly badly, Equally Im happy to broadcast something I have done quite well, it makes for better reading when you read about someone misfortunes though so I could probably patent it and turn it into a worldwide smash, "The SEO Woes of Wes" has a nice ring to it..

Thanks and best regards Thomas

Wes Dunn

Hi All

First question here so go easy.. I have a property site which is working well so far considering it;s early days, unfortunately some of my earlier efforts did not go so well and one in particular I pretty much destroyed in my attempts to improve the site SEO. Lucky enough my SEO skills have improved quite a bit lately, largely thanks to the great tools, tutorials and experts here at Moz

My question is whether I can use a 301 redirect to pass the domain authority and any link equity from an unused site to the one that ive done a better job on? it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy...

Thanks everyone and thanks for all the help over the last 6 months or so..

Wes Dunn

Hi Matt

Thanks alot for the reply, there is nothing really wrong with the domain concerning links etc as far as I know, I just made a bit of a mess of the site by changing, category bases, taxonomy names, posts types etc, you are right about the wonderful world of SEO, It has been a frustrating year or so learning by my mistakes but very rewarding as my knowledge and skills improve, I am very grateful to everyone here for that and the Moz Pro tools has been a massive help also.

My old domain seemed to incur 2 penalties due to penguin updates but I just put that down to the mess I had made really, duplicate content was possibly a reason as I had no incline about cannonicalization and the changes I made duplicated just about everything multiple times, If Google issues penalties for providing a poor user experience then I probably got hit with a few of those also.. I could write several pages about bad mistakes I have made previously but so far Ive never had a Manual Action message or anything from Google to indicate Ive really messed up....

Thanks again for the reply, the new site is in much better shape than the old one ever was so perhaps it's best not to try and cut any corners

regards

Wes Dunn

Hi Thomas

Thanks a lot, I have read this article briefly before but I need to put some proper time aside to really absorb it, I'm always optimistic and have a background in IT Training so it's in my nature to want to help others improve, The SEO world is so vast, it's great to know there are so many talented SEO's here for me to learn from and hopefully pass what I have learnt down to others.

I will definitely do the Youmoz when I have a little free time, I would love to get some feedback from you and others and the community so stay tuned

Thanks again for your support, it means a great deal

Best regards

Wes Dunn