Why the rapid drop in Domain Authority?

[OhYeahSteve]

I couple weeks ago I switched my website from Drupal to a Wordpress CMS: Martial Arts Austin   My rankings have  remained the same, but the Domain Authority has plummeted from like 29 to 21. I know this is small fry, but I don't want my business to drop in ranking.

The URL's were kept exactly the same, with the internal links and copy also kept the same with few additions.

Also, according to Open Site Explorer, the site's stronger pages have now averaged out with the weaker and unused pages so they all now share the same Page Authority - that doesn't seem right. Is there reason for concern?

Did I screw something up, or am I making too much of this?

Thanks

[KeriMorgret]

There was an update to Open Site Explorer on September 13th that might account for the change in domain authority, and it may well be that your DA would have had the same change even if you hadn't touched your site. Here's a blog post from Rand about the latest OSE update: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-september-update-feedback.

Having the same PA across all of the pages doesn't sound right. For that, I'd send an email to the help desk at help@seomoz.org and let them know about it.

I'd say don't panic just yet!

Keri

[RyanKent]

Hi Steve.

The most likely cause of your DA drop is some URLs from the old site no longer exist on the new site. Something was missed.

The easiest way to test this theory is to compare a list of your backlink profile from the old site with the backlink profile of the new site. If you didn't track your backlinks in the past, then I suggest you start now as it is a good tool to help troubleshooting this type of issue. A few other items to check out:

• Did you use any 302 redirects? If so, that is an issue as the link value does not flow when a 302 is used.

• Did you remove ANY pages from your site during the CMS migration? If so, those pages may have had links which contributed to your site's overall DA.

• It's also possible a site which linked to you previously decided to remove the link at the same time as the CMS change.

I tried to look at your site and noticed it is redirected to http://www.meetup.com/pmaustin/. Your site is a martial arts site where this is a project management site. Something seems wrong.

[RobertFisher]

There is one other possibility and that would be the "canonical redirect." If your site is PMA (only one I saw with PA 21 in serps), when you put www.yourdomain.com in you get a page auth of 33 to go with your DA 21. But, when you put in the root without the www, ( yourdomain.com ) you get a PA of 18 and your linking root domains drop a bit.... from 42 to 1.

In WordPress, with any of the SEO plugins we have used (All in one, Genesis, etc), the canonical redirect does not happen. You have to do it in the .htaccess file. There are plenty of good directions for how to: query .htaccess redirects. Or, there are several gurus around moz who can post directions here..... (I'm not one)

My guess is that when you do this, you will see a change in short time (few weeks at most).