Domain Change behind Drop in DA from 49 to 9?
-
Hi,
We have recently gone through a domain change and thought we had done this by the book. We 301'd the old site extensively and optimized our new site as best we can. All done with the help of a leading agency.
However our old site had a DA score of 49 and checking our new site's DA almost 3 months after the changes its scores 9!
Furthermore with rankings 2-3wks after the change we saw small drops (1-3 positions), 3-10 weeks saw more gradual slides but remaining page 1 for most terms. Currently some core terms are slipping back to page 2.
I have the below question on this and would like you to get your opinions and views.
-
After a well planned domain change would its be expected that the DA score would remain in the same region or is a drop like this normal?
-
Is the domain change the most likely cause of this drop or are there other factors that may cause this?
-
What is the best approach for trouble shooting this situation?
-
-
Thanks Thomas, yes i guess this may well be the reason. We had the new URL live for a period of 3-4 months before we made the 301 of the old site so the score of 9 may be from the new site being scored before the actual change is my assumptions... I've checked other software to now like Majestic and Ahrefs and scores in these are similar to pre domain change.
-
This could possibly be due to: https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/10-14-mozscape-index-update-details
See the following snippet: "Second, many PA/DA and other metric scores will look very similar to the last index because we lost and had problems with some metrics in processing (and believe that much of what we calculated may have been erroneous). We're using metrics from the prior index (which had good correlations with Google, etc) until we can feel confident that the new ones we're calculating are correct."
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unexplainable drop in traffic
Hello Mozzers, I am new at Moz and certainly hope you can help me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | svsanchez75
I used to consider myself very knowledgeable in SEO since I had hundreds or maybe thousands of keywords very well ranked on Google Guatemala (www.google.com.gt) for more than a decade. That was until a year ago: November 8th, 2019... On that date, all of my rankings plummeted, never to return. At first I thought it was just a hickup from the Google Algorithm, but as days turned into weeks I became very worried, so I started doing a bunch of things: Reworked the pages (except home page) to make them responsive (I used to have two versions of each page, one for desktop and one for mobile). Removed the ads from the pages to make them faster, thinking it could be due to the speed (even if my competitors sites were slower!) Fixed thousands of 404s Disavowed thousands of bad domains and spammy URLs (I never bought a single link but there were thousands of links from forums, theglobe network, etc) Removed more than 12,000 members from my own forum who had never posted anything: about 4000 of them just had created a profile to include a link to different extenral sites. Fixed a few other technical aspects... Nothing helped. In fact, my rankings have kept going down. My content is good and unique, my site has good DA but still I get outranked and buried by several sites which don't have as much information as I have. There are NO manual actions against my site according to Search Console. As I mentioned before, I have never bought any backlinks, so all of my links should be natural (although there were thousands of links to my forum from spammy sites which I disavowed). So, I am frustrated as I really don't know what the problem is. I am giving you 3 examples of Keywords and URLs of pages that were number one for years, and now are not even on first page, so that you can see them and tell me your thoughts about what may be happening: KEYWORD: VOLCANES DE GUATEMALA
URL: https://www.deguate.com/geografia/volcanes/Los-volcanes-de-Guatemala.shtml Note: was #1, now is on 5th page. Removed all the ads to see if it would help. KEYWORD: MINISTERIOS DE GUATEMALA URL: https://www.deguate.com/artman/publish/politica_ministerios/Los-ministerios-de-Guatemala.shtml Note: was #1, now is on 2nd page. Removed all the ads to see if it would help. KEYWORD: LEYENDAS DE GUATEMALA URL: https://www.deguate.com/artman/publish/misterios-leyendas/las-leyendas-mas-famosas-en-guatemala.shtml Note: Was #1, now is on 3rd page. It's stuffed with ads, as it doesn't seem to matter wheter my pages have ads or not, and since I lost my rankings on thousands of pages at least I can probably generate a little more income like that. Thank you so much for the help you can provide!0 -
When domain a buys domain b (whose links direct to c), does domain a has links redirecting to domain c ?
Hi, I really need to know what happens when a company or domain (a) acquires another company with domain (b) with its links pointing to yet another location (c). Does company a then have redirects to c?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yeshourun0 -
Domain Change Before or After Site Revamp?
In the last year traffic to our site has dropped in half and ranking has dropped significantly. Very little no content has been added in that time. We would now like to improve ranking by adding new content. 2 domains effectively exist for the site. The existing domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. But www.metro-manhattan.com redirects to www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Our company is Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc.. We registered www.metro-manhattan.com and created the redirect to www.nyc-officespace-leader.com in 2012. www.nyc-officespace-leader.com was registered in 2006. Many links to the site show www.metro-manhattan.com and I believe this may be a source of confusion for Google. Would it be best to make the domain consistent at this time by redirecting it once and for all and to do so before adding new content? If this is done correctly can we avoid taking a hit on ranking? Note: -www.nyc-officespace-leader.com is the old domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-www.metro-manhattan is the new domain but has existed since 2012 and has been redirecting to the old domain since then
-The company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space (similar in branding to the new domain) Am I correct in assuming that having the 2 domains may be causing issues with Google involving domain authority? Change the domain before adding content or add content before?0 -
Content From One Domain Mysteriously Indexing Under a Different Domain's URL
I've pulled out all the stops and so far this seems like a very technical issue with either Googlebot or our servers. I highly encourage and appreciate responses from those with knowledge of technical SEO/website problems. First some background info: Three websites, http://www.americanmuscle.com, m.americanmuscle.com and http://www.extremeterrain.com as well as all of their sub-domains could potentially be involved. AmericanMuscle sells Mustang parts, Extremeterrain is Jeep-only. Sometime recently, Google has been crawling our americanmuscle.com pages and serving them in the SERPs under an extremeterrain sub-domain, services.extremeterrain.com. You can see for yourself below. Total # of services.extremeterrain.com pages in Google's index: http://screencast.com/t/Dvqhk1TqBtoK When you click the cached version of there supposed pages, you see an americanmuscle page (some desktop, some mobile, none of which exist on extremeterrain.com😞 http://screencast.com/t/FkUgz8NGfFe All of these links give you a 404 when clicked... Many of these pages I've checked have cached multiple times while still being a 404 link--googlebot apparently has re-crawled many times so this is not a one-time fluke. The services. sub-domain serves both AM and XT and lives on the same server as our m.americanmuscle website, but answer to different ports. services.extremeterrain is never used to feed AM data, so why Google is associating the two is a mystery to me. the mobile americanmuscle website is set to only respond on a different port than services. and only responds to AM mobile sub-domains, not googlebot or any other user-agent. Any ideas? As one could imagine this is not an ideal scenario for either website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
Domain forward or 301 redirect
My company recently acquired another company including their web presence. We are soon ending their website and will be either 301 redirecting their domain to our domain or pointing their domain to our nameservers. Their domain authority is only 25 while our domain authority is 32. Their domain was created in 1998 while ours was created in 1999. So to keep our domain authority up or enhance it, should we do a 301 redirect or a domain forward. And that is if there is any difference? Thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | topsailislander0 -
SEO value in baclklink from blog.domain VS domain
Will a back-link from "domain.com/abc" and "blog.domain.com/abc" have same value from an SEO perspective? Assume same article written on both sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen
I have been told the bots look at the domain value and the only links from blogs that have less value are in case of comments. As long as the "blog.domain/abc" page includes a full article and not a blog comment then it counts fully for SEO. Is this correct?0 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
What would be the best domain choice?
Hello I got a website www.keywordCA.com and I'm ranking #1 spot on "keyword" but what I notice if you have the exact match you get more site links and etc. Like this keyword that match with my domain name "keyword CA" The ideal name will be www.keyword.com but is taken and the owner don't want to sell the domain (at least he is not using it, is just parked) and I also got the domain www.keyword.net Do you think www.keyword.net will be much better than KeywordCA.com in order to get more exposure and google will generate more site links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpgprinting0