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]
-
Someone from Moz will probably give better insights but the DA metric may not be impacted by your change but rather the update to the tracking index from Moz. If you read into the DA metric they provide I believe it is relative to their index and will fluctuate based on data they hold - primarily about links and site quality as a whole.
I'd be surprised if pruning your content put you in a place where DA was negatively impacted as a direct result.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Why is my domain authority still 1?
I changed the domain of my website from www.vanillacrush.co.uk to www.carissamay.co.uk at the end of December and yet my DA for carissamay is still 1. As advised, I set up a 301 redirect from VC to CM which seems to be working fine. However when I check on redirect detective it tells me I also have a 302 set up. Could this be confusing things? http://www.vanillacrush.co.uk http://www.vanillacrush.co.uk/ http://www.carissamay.co.uk Any help would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carissamay0 -
Same content on other domain owned by de company. Canonical is not working
Hi! I am analyzing a website right now. It's a school, let's name it NEWSCHOOL. This school is owned by other school, let's name it, BIGSCHOOL NEWSCHOOL is specialized in tourism degrees, and the BIGSCHOOL is a bigger and older one with a lot of different degrees. What happens is that NEWSCHOOL has a course, let's name it TOURISM DEGREE.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
BIGSCHOOL has that course too, with the same content, trying to help to promote the content, because this school is older, well known and has a consolidated brand internationally. BIGSCHOOL, has placed a canonical tag, telling Google that content comes from NEWSCHOOL. What is happening is that the result of newschool is beeing omited by google. The first result is the BIGSCHOOL content, and then a lot of training portals, where the degree content is too to increase its visibility. So, I would like to know, how can we do to say google that the content that it should show is the one of NEWSCHOOL and not the one in BIGSCHOOL. It's pretty clear that Google knows that those portals are closed related, because it is omitting the NEWSCHOOL results. I know that we can send a link from the content area from one portal to the other in the content we want. But... would it solve the problem... and y we have to repeat that for each degree, woudn't it be a little dangerous? Would like to know your points of view! Thanks!0 -
Low Domain Authority & Ranking
My Domain Authority has tumbled in the last six months from 28 to 21. Search traffic has dropped from about 4,500 per month to 3,000 per month with most of the drop being in the more competitive terms. Lead generation is off by about 70%. This is after spending $12,000 on "optimization" with a MOZ recommended SEO firm and spending another $17,000 implementing their suggestions. My real estate brokerage firm has completed some press worthy deals in the last month. If I can get these deals mentioned in a reputable newspaper like The New York Times (or other real estate publications like NY Observer, Real Estate Weekly) will this help domain authority? If my domain authority is this low, how difficult is it to move it higher? Before reaching out to these publications, should I create a blog post about these transactions on my website? Any suggestions as to how I can improve domain authority? My URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I should add that my SEO firm had about 30 toxic links removed and filed a disavow for about another 80 links. MOZ is only showing about 25 domains linking to our site. I suspect not enough to get us to rank. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Where the "fudge-nuggets" are my internal links?
Ok, so... Google Webmaster Tools Internal Links are not showing any links to my site's homepage. I only link to the homepage by wrapping the logo with the link throughout the site. Does Google need these to be text links to show them? [/](<a class=)" title="Kona Coffee">![](<a class=)http://1s93mbet6ccj5zkm31703gqj8.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/kona-coffee-1.png" alt="Kona Coffee"/> Site is here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AhlerManagement
http://goo.gl/4C8GKc Could CDN image source be affecting it? Lost... please help!0 -
Best to Post Dynamic Content (Listings) under "Posts" in Wordpress?
My commercial real estate web site is being migrated to Wordpress from Drupal. Is it advisable to place dynamic content that will use taxonomy under "Posts" ? Listings will be changed every few months and there could be anywhere from several hundred to several thousand of them on the site. Developers have given me different advice. One has been adamant that listings and neighborhood pages (there will be about 25 neighborhood pages) should not be in the post section which is to be strictly reserved for blog entries. The last thing I want is to create a site structure which is unfriendly to SEO!!!! I would very much appreciate the perspective of anyone proficient with Wordpress and SEO. Thanks!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan Rosinsky0 -
Fetch as GoogleBot "Unreachable Page"
Hi, We are suddenly having an error "Unreachable Page" when any page of our site is accessed as Googlebot from webmaster tools. There are no DNS errors shown in "Crawl Errors". We have two web servers named web1 and web2 which are controlled by a software load balancer HAProxy. The same network configuration has been working for over a year now and never had any GoogleBot errors before 21st of this month. We tried to check if there could be any error in sitemap, .htaccess or robots.txt by excluding the loadbalancer and pointing DNS to web1 and web2 directly and googlebot was able to access the pages properly and there was no error. But when loadbalancer was made active again by pointing the DNS to it, the "unreachable page" started appearing again. This very same configuration has been working properly for over a year till 21st of this month. Website is properly accessible from browser and there are no DNS errors either as shown by "Crawl Errors". Can you guide me about how to diagnose the issue. I've tried all sorts of combinations, even removed the firewall but no success. Is there any way to get more details about error instead of just "Unreachable Page" error ? Regards, shaz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaz_lhr0 -
Pagination: rel="next" rel="prev" in ?
With Google releasing that instructional on proper pagination I finally hunkered down and put in a site change request. I wanted the rel="next" and rel="prev" implemented… and it took two weeks for the guy to get it done. Brutal and painful. When I looked at the source it turned out he put it in the body above the pagination links… which is not what I wanted. I wanted them in the . Before I respond to get it properly implemented I want a few opinions - is it okay to have the rel="next" in the body? Or is it pretty much mandatory to put it in the head? (Normally, if I had full control over this site, I would just do it myself in 2 minutes… unfortunately I don't have that luxury with this site)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss1 -
Use of <h2class="hidden">- SEO implications</h2class="hidden">
I'm just looking at a website with <h2class="hidden">Main Navigation and <h2class="hidden">Footer inserted on each page, and am wondering about the SEO implications.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
<a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a></h2class="hidden"></h2class="hidden">0