DA/PA has reverted to 1?

[icandoit]

Hi,

Looking for some advise.  I have a local business website that was built and managed by a web developer.  The site was/is very basic and really was only there as a place for potential customers to visit after finding out about us via more traditional local marketing.

I decided to make the website work for us more and improve the SEO etc to get it ranking better and finding us customers rather than us sending customers to the website.

Long story short I wanted to change from an HTML site to a wordpress site to enable me more control over updates/blogging etc.  Web developer said he only works with HTML, so I decided to go it alone.  As things stand the website hasn't been changed and still remains hosted by the developer but on the 12th of February he transferred the domain to me.

Now I'm not sure exactly what my DA was in February but it was at least double figures but now it is 1.  As I said only thing that has changed as far as I'm aware is the transfer of the domain to me.

I'm at the point were I'm close to doing the transfer over to wordpress.  Been working on keywords, content etc to make things better but then noticed my issue.  Anybody have any ideas why this would have happened?  Or the process I can go through to find the route of the problem before I continue with the change over?

Thanks

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi

If nothing has changed other than the domain transfer, so your site is still the same on the same server with the same structure and no other changes have occured such as a sudden loss of links then there is a good chance this could be down to the Moz index update itself. You mentioned your DA was higher in February, however since then there has been updates, you can check more here for updates - https://moz.com/products/api/updates. I have seen others have a similar issue in the past noticing a sudden drop in DA since an update and this is due to the Moz index reducing the amount of URLs in it - it is currently at 139 billion whereas it was at 141 billion on March 2nd and 145 billion at the end of January. If the index is using less links this can lead to it using less links to calculate your domain authority and big drops can be seen in some cases.

In terms of your migration to Wordpress make sure that you 301 redirect the old html URLs to their new location/URL on WordPress.

Although very in-depth you may find some of the information in the post an interesting read - https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

Hope this helps!

Matt

[MattAntonino]

Could you be looking at the wrong (www vs non) version of the site?

Did the dev block robots.txt from all bots (or Mozbot) before transfer?

Are you still cached & indexed in Google?

There's also an ongoing issue with some sites as seen here.

[DavidLee]

Hello!

Small sites generally won't stay in our index if we don't find NEW links to a domain. Our cache will remove a link after 190 days unless re-crawled.

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/just-discovered?site=moz.com&filter=&source=&target=page&page=1&sort=crawled

I recommend checking Just Discovered to see if your domain is in queue for re-indexing from new discovered links. If not, you will want to keep link building on sites that have high authority and are likely able to be picked up..

There are some insight provided here that will help: https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Cheers!