Transfering Page Authority

[NaescentAdam]

Hi,

I have recently change my url architecture with site redesign and was just doing some analysis of the old and new pages.

I seem to be losing a little bit of Organic Search because of it. As an example this old diving page in open site explorer shows a Page Authority of 46 whilst the new diving page shows a Page Authority of 22.

I have a 301 redirect going from the old page to the new, but that seems to be quite a drop in Page Authority. Is there anything else I can be doing to improve upon it?

Thanks,

Adam

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Adam-

It seems to have moved up to 30 in page authority.  Make sure you have the 301 redirect set up with "follow".

Are you still splitting seo value between www.smallhope.com..... and smallhope.com.... or is everyhting redirected to one or the other?

Mark

[NaescentAdam]

Hey Mark,

Thanks for the quick reply. I have nearly 100 redirects in place at the moment.

I have smallhope.com pointing to www.smallhope.com using

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^smallhope.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.smallhope.com$
RewriteRule ^SHBHome.html$ "http://www.smallhope.com/" [R=301,L]

and the diving page using this

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^smallhope.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.smallhope.com$
RewriteRule ^Diving.html$ "http://www.smallhope.com/activities/diving.html" [R=301,L]

I thought that all the 301s would imply a follow, is this not the case?

Can I be doing more?

Adam

[NaescentAdam]

p.s.

also double checking the page authoruty and open site still says 22?

Am I missing something?

[Saijo.George]

301 with "follow" ? I don't think I have heard that one before. AFAIK 301 pass link juice .. there is no way to set follow.

You have recently changed it so give it some time . Also IMHO if you want to rank for diving 1 would have been a better option ( assuming everything else stays the same )

1. www.smallhope.com/Diving.html
2. www.smallhope.com/activities/diving.html

[NaescentAdam]

That's what I thought, have you got any ideas as to why I'm only passing 22 of the 46 potential page authority points?

[Saijo.George]

You have recently changed it so give it some time .

[NaescentAdam]

I changed it 2 1/2 months ago. Are we talking something like 6 months?

[tfbpa]

Adam, please don't look too much into the numbers Seomoz is displaying...

Those numbers only make sense to Seomoz, not to Google or Bing and those are the ones who matter.

For some reason many people think PA and DA are the holy grail of search, sorry Seomoz, but they are just numbers thought up by a company who has no relation to either Google or Bing and therefore really shouldn't be that much worshiped.

I am not saying the numbers are worthless, just saying that it is not the end-all-be-all of search.

[Dr-Pete]

If you only changed the URL, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Your 301-redirect seems to be working properly. It can take time to kick in fully (both for us and for Google), but we also base PA on an overall model of the links, so we transfer less through the 301 (especially in the short-term) than Google does. I don't think you have any reason to worry here.

The only issue would be if you changed the overall site architecture, and not just the URLs. Then, it is possible that the new page is getting less internal link "juice".

[NaescentAdam]

Hi Guys,

Sorry for late reply was away yesterday. There's a little more to the problem really. I did a complete site redesign and increased the number of internal links per page. So gone from say 20 to 80, so I'm guessing after what you've just said Pete that the internal links are diluting the page rank.

I know what you mean tfbpa about not paying too much to non-google numbers, Steve Webb's was saying a similar thing the other day in his awesome SEO audit post (pure gold for someone like me). The problem is I am also getting the same info in Google Webmaster Tools. In Google webmaster tools I get 27,000 impressions the day the site goes live and one week later I get 6,500 impressions, stabilising around the 3,500-4,000 mark.

I've asked about this before but been advised that it will take time to settle, but 3 months later and it does very much seem to have settled, but at a substantially lower amount.

That said overall my organic SEO is at the same level as this time last year but I've dropped on some keywords to 25% of last year. So I think what is happening is that I have diluted my page rank for internal pages causing a drop in SEO for those keywords, but I've improved the structure of the new site and caused an increase in page ranking for home page targetted keywords.

So I was looking to see how I could maximise the transfer of page rank info (Google, SeoMoz or any other metric) by doing anything and everything before moving on to a new SEO strategy for building that rank back up or increasing it over and above what it was.

Can you think of anything else I can do, apart from decreasing the internal links?

Thanks for the great responses to btw, I really appreciate the support.

Adam