Domain Authority and Page Authority down - Change of Server
-
Dear All,
Today I noticed that our page authority and domain authority is down, and the number of linking domains is also down. We do not have too many linking domains to our site, but at least one blogger link to us, with a very nice article about our site (since some months ago) and this link does not appear in the site explorer (follow link). This blog is well indexed by google, but impossible to see using open site explorer for some reason unknown to me; and two pages we helped, and they link also to us (follow links): their links appear in the webmaster tools, but not in the site explorer. Neither the blog nor those two pages were in the site explorer before, the links that were removed are from other sources (SEO analisys pages, automatic generated when I run a test by them, so I supossed not high quality links at all, not content related, we don't miss them).
Our site was partially down for 1 1/2 day this week due change of server, from a shared hosting to a VPS. Now all pages are up again, and we are improving everything, working really hard (almost no sleep at all in two days). Could it also have something to do with the lower domain authority? How bad penalized google the time down of a domain? How long will we feel the effects of that?
Listing published in our site are ranking exactly as before, but I am afraid this could change in the near future.
Since the end of December (not directly related to my question), we do not have this nice snipped showing the main pages of our site, when we writte the exact domain name in google. At the time, we did not any change, and this did not affect the listings ranking (they even improved in some cases); we rank better for the main keyword, so the snipped changed, without other problems.
So, the questions:
-
Have made site explorer any change in the last days, to discard low quality links?
-
Could be the lower domain authority related to the down time of our site?
-
How long can be felt the effects of the down time in google results? Is it something that can be felt forever? =(
-
Do you have any idea why google decides in some cases to remove the site links in the snipped? General question, I know it is not possible to answer it for any specific domain without looking at it. We would like to have those links again.
-
Is there something we can do in order site explorer visit that blog I mentioned? I will try to crawl it using the dashboard to see what happen.
Many thanks for your help!
Daniel
-
-
Howdy Daniel,
Some good information here, let me add my own 2 cents;
1. Mozscape and Open Site Explorer are updated about every 4 weeks. The metrics are entirely link-based, so downtime of your server won't effect the numbers.
Because we use a new index every few weeks, there's a natural fluctuation in the number of links we find. There are literally billions and billions of links on the web we have to crawl every month, calculate metrics for each one, and then package them into an index that makes sense.
Sometimes links will disappear or re-appear in the index. This is natural and usually minor, although a large jump or decrease in your Domain Authority can be scary - it doesn't mean your traffic or rankings will change. Mozscape may have trouble finding links on pages without a lot of links pointing to them, or links hidden under layers of navigation. For more, see this document:
http://www.seomoz.org/help/open-site-explorer-faq
2. Usually Google won't penalize you if your site is down, but if it's down regularly or for an extended period, this could have negative consequences. If you feel your site has suffered because of this, I might suggest submitting a fresh sitemap, or try the "crawl as googlebot" feature as soon as your back up and running. May not do much, but it's worth a shot.
3. Sitelinks - I don't have a definite answer about this, but Google seems to show sitelinks based on user intent, the popularity of your pages, navigation structure, and overall authority. Although Google offers a tool to remove sitelinks, it's pretty hard to influence exactly what they choose to show and when.
Hope this information helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Hi! Thanks for your answers.
So far our site has not dropped in the results for the keywords I tested. The only negative signals found until now are:
-
Dramatic drop in the number of pages indexed, according to google webmaster tools: but not for the pages that are listed in the sitemaps, those were untouched. Drop pages should be mainly duplicated content created by the CMS before we started using canonical tags (not 100% sure which are those dropped pages).
-
Clean up of keywords related to my site. When we installed a new CMS theme for a subsection of our site few months ago, the theme had post "examples", which I overlooked and google indexed those posts very quickly. For a long time I had "lorem ipsum", etc.. as keywords in the webmaster tool list. Now, they are gone, and the real keywords are still there.
I do not know what would happen in the next days with the search results of my good keywords, I hope they mantain their position, or improve it Let`s see...
Thanks again,
Daniel
-
-
I changed servers a few weeks ago and have been 99% dropped from the rankings. I've searched for an answer in many places, a few people said that google does penalise you for a major change in the site like a server change, but only for a few weeks.
So hopefully both our sites will be back to normal in a few weeks. Fingers crossed!
-
Hi,
Google does penalize for site downtime, in its eyes it means your site is not stable but you can recover from it, exact time is possibly a few months, just try to make sure you do not have anymore downtime if you can.
Regarding the OSE and links, it is quite slow to update, if it show you no longer have a link that you know you had, simply go and check on the site to see if it's still there, if it is you don't need to worry, OSE will eventually re-crawl it and find it again.
Site links are a sign that google trusts your site, if your site has big downtime like 1.5 days, it is not exactly a trusted sign for google, so the site links may have been removed for that reason.
All the best
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
-
Linking root domains to your own site
I have been using the moz open site explorer tool and glancing at my competition. I noticed most sites if not all in the linking domains section have a link to there own site. How do i do this? On my site i have no established links and my score is only 1/1. Even with lower ranking sites that have there own site linking to there self have a 16/16. Any help would be appreciated I am pretty new to all of this. thanks
Link Building | | unlimitedairbrush0 -
301 redirect lost page authority & total links how ensure it passes on.
hello, I recently changed from www to non www. I have redirected my whole website so if I type www. it goes to the non-www page. doing a open site explorer I noticed my www. still has the page authority 14/100 with 6 links. where as the non-www page has 1/100 page authority and no links. how do I get the www. to mirror the non-www links?
Link Building | | finnmoto
eg if you goto http://www.finnmoto.com.au/mens-motorcycle-kevlar-hoodie/ it will goto the non-www version automatically, so why does the non-www replicate the page authority / total links attached picture for reference.
Google webmaster has been selected for non-www, its been about 2 weeks.
my domain authority i think about about 21 or more now its 19 aswell. I have a feeling:
nofollow or rel=canonical has something to do with it but Ill need read into what that does and how to apply. any ideas? uRiJ2Ul.png?10 -
Ranking Multiple Domains Simultaneously
What kind of strategy would one implement to rank multiple domains in SERPs? (One domain per keyword) I am looking more into link blocking and that, but I don't know the effectiveness and consistency of the strategy. Does anyone have any recommendations? I really can't be arsed giving every single site it's own full SEO treatment 🙂 Thanks very kindly and in advance for your thoughts 🙂
Link Building | | Ultra_Valves0 -
Does the number of people who click on a link to your site from another domain influence your domain authority?
Say you have a link to your site on the BBC, is it the fact that you're being linked to from a domain of very high authority that boost your own domain authority or is it dependent on how many people actually click on your link from that site? Any insights much appreciated!
Link Building | | loco20 -
Are Links/Resources pages considered spam?
I'm dabbling with link building in a non link-happy industry, traffic safety (IE Traffic cones, barricades, safety vests, etc...). We currently are doing #RCS in terms of giveaways for college students as well as discounts in a wider EDU Outreach campaign as well as legitimate guest posting. I have started to use Link Prospector, and got a list of links/resources pages that we can get info from. I found some great links through here, including ways to get links from higher-profile .gov domains, but was wondering if it is worth it to go after the high(er) quality links/resources pages. By higher quality, I usually set a floor of a DA 25-30 and have a limited amount of external links per page. These would be for branded keywords (IE the company name/domain) and not exact match anchor text. I'd really like to see how other SEOs feel about this. Thanks Zachary Russell President, ProTech Internet Group
Link Building | | Zachary_Russell1 -
Linking Root Domain does not show twitter
I wonder what it takes to capture twitter as a backlink. We have a twitter account @idyllicsoftware which never occurs in open site explorer. Also it never shows newer back links. Could you suggest how to use it better?
Link Building | | idyllicsoftware0 -
Root domain registered in search engines, inbound links to www sub-domain. A problem?
I just discovered that our site is registered with the major search engines without the "www" sub domain. Both domains resolve directly to our site, which I need to get corrected. I had planned to have the root (honestabe.com) forwarded to the sub (www.honestabe.com). However, I then found that the sub-domain is not listed with the search engines. Of course, naturally almost all of our inbound links include www. Does Google differentiate between links with and without the sub-domain? In other words, if I forward the www address to the root, will I still get the SEO benefit of those inbound links using www? I'm trying to figure out how to approach this. I'm hoping someone is going to make me feel really stupid for asking this and say it's no big deal. However, I have a feeling this could be a mess.
Link Building | | honestabejosh0 -
Building Links to Exact Match Domains
What are the pros and cons having exact match domain and how can you create a brand name and build backlinks? Say we have a domain personalizedbirthdaygifts.com We are quite stuck with what anchor text we need to use and how do we vary it? I've heard that we have to stay away from using commercial keywords as anchor text heavily. We have to also use our brand name. And here we get stuck as we don't have a brand name. In this case Our brand name should be personalized birthday gifts but this is also commercial keyword. I have seen before similar websites droped from ranking because they have commercial keywords in their domain and most of their backlink anchor texts are commercial. If I had a website called twentyfive.com selling birthday gifts it would be a lot easier. But when you have a website personalizedbirthdaygifts.com and trying to rank for personalized birthday gifts and birthday gifts it's tough. OR isn't it? I hope I explained it well and didn't confuse anybody... Thanks
Link Building | | Jvalops0