Page Authority higher on my old (redirected) domain than new domain?

[james.crowley]

Hi everyone. I moved the domain my blog was on about 18 months ago, and it's ranking in Google never recovered. I've noticed in the 'Inbound Links' tool that my old domain (jamescrowley.co.uk) shows a page authority of 26, while my new domain (jamescrowley.net) shows a page authority of 15. Any idea why that would be? 301 redirects have been in place for the whole 18 months, so I'd have thought the authority would have been 'passed on' by now?

Many thanks

James

[samantha.chapman]

Hey there James,

Sam from Moz's Help Team here!

Sorry about the trouble there - so, the thing to keep in mind here is that we do take 301 redirects into account in terms of our index updates, but for us to update any 301 link, we would need to re-discover the old pages to be able to follow and update the metrics. This is not likely common for sites with lower authority since old links are not continuously shared on new pages/articles/blogs.

Link Explorer works solely through link discovery and crawling. For every link we index/crawl, these links are not guaranteed to be re-crawled.  In order for our crawler to update metrics to reflect the new domain, it would need to recrawl the pages linking to your site and discover the links which redirect.

The discrepancies between the DA or PA of your old domain and new domain are probably due to the previously externally discovered links that haven't moved over just or haven’t been discovered. I hope this helps to explain - definitely let me know if you have any follow up questions!