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
-
When "pruning" old content, is it normal to see an drop in Domain Authority on Moz crawl report?
After reading several posts about the benefits of pruning old, irrelevant content, I went through a content audit exercise to kick off the year. The biggest category of changes so far has been to noindex + remove from sitemap a number of blog posts from 2015/2016 (which were very time-specific, i.e. software release details). I assigned many of the old posts a new canonical URL pointing to the parent category. I realize it'd be ideal to point to a more relevant/current blog post, but could this be where I've gone wrong? Another big change was to hide the old posts from the archive pages on the blog. Any advice/experience from anyone doing something similar much appreciated! Would be good to be reassured I'm on the right track and a slight drop is nothing to worry about. 🙂 If anyone is interested in having a look: https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots [this is the category where changes have been made, primarily] https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots/keyboard-shortcut-editing/ [example of a pruned post]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jonmc1 -
Should I change my permalink structure?
Hi guys, hope you've had a manageable working week. Just after some advice! What would you think to changing the permalink structure of an already established entertainment website so that the category and postdate also appears in the URL, i.e "2014-01-01/news/this-is-the-post"? I have done it before without thinking about all the crawl errors it would cause and quickly reverted everything. However, I am now eager to get listed in Google News (don't worry, this isn't the only reason to change the URL) and think it might help things overall. Thoughts? Worth the effort or a pointless exercise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Buying Expired Domains with Decent DA/PA for SEO Purposes
Hey guys, i've seen some stuff about this before but I recently found an opportunity to put it into action and wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into! I am looking at buying a domain (expired and now only 10 dollars) that has a decent domain authority and has some keywords in it related to my clients practice. I plan on using a 301 redirect to pass "link juice" because this client is looking for a quick bump in rankings. Thoughts? Benefits? Problems with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley1 -
Sub domain on root domain
Hello,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dror999
I have a question that I can't find a good answer on.
I have a site, actually a "portal"/ "directory" for service providers.
Now, for start, we opened every service provider own page on our site, but now we get a lot of applications from those providers that thy want sites from their own.
We want to make every service provider his own site, but on sub domain url. ( they don’t mind… its ok for them)
So, my site is www.exaple.com
There site will be: provider.exaple.com
Now I have two questions:
1. can it harm my site in SEO?
2. if one from those sub domain , punished by google because is owner do "black hat seo" , how it will affect the rood domin? It can make the root domain to get punished?
Thanks!!0 -
Changing your URL? Impact on rankings?
I have been thinking about changing our webadres for quite a while but I'm too afraid of the impact on my SERP. I understand I would need to use the Google Change of Address tool & 301 redirects. Am I missing something? What is your experience with changing the URL of a website? How has this impacted your SERP? In the past I heard someone say it will damage the linkjuice by 20%. Is that accurate? If you change the URL, is there a blank period of where your old site nor your new site are indexed? Or does Google handle this transition well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
Complementary Domain
Hi guys, I have the following situation I would like some help. Because my client is in Brazil, I will make up fictional names so it's easier to understand. My client is a shoe store whose domain is mangabeira.com. That is the brand name and will always be the main domain and reference of the website. We were offered the domain shoes.com. There is no intention of changing the brand name or anything, but there would be a redirect that would send the user who to mangabeira.com. My question is how much impact would that complementary domain do to my SEO performance and how that redirect must be handled. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LucasLopes0 -
URL formating is it worth changing?
One of my clients sites has almost OK URL's, set up something like the following: keyword2_keyword3_keyword1 Ideally the URL's would be more like this: keyword1-keyword2-keyword3 My question is is there any point in changing them and 301 redirecting them over just to get the target keywords in a better order and change the _ to a - ? Has anyone tried this and its worked or not worked, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Justin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrouchyKids0 -
Recovery during domain migration
On average, how long does it takes to recover 80% of the rankings if two high authority domains are combined without chaging any content? I totally understand that each domain is different and search engines can treat them differently but if all the steps are followed to the T what are the chances?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninjamarketer1