Sudden decrease in Moz Page rank

[MKaloud]

Hello,

We have a serious issue with 404s and recently saw our Moz Page rank fall from 53 to 47.

1. OSE Inbound links no longer shows any of our Linked In posts, did Linked In stop passing juice?

2. Does SEO Moz reduce your ranking when there's a sudden increase in 404s?

2a. WP Yoast SEO - I accidentally checked the box on this plugin to "Strip the category base (usually /category/) from the category URL" which basically caused all of our blog post categories and Datafeedr categories to disappear. Didn't realize till too much time had passed that I accidentally clicked that box.

Datafeedr is a plugin for our estore that parses the data feeds from affiliate vendors and allows you to create a saved search that auto updates old products every 3 days. I had a no index/follow parameter on the category items, but seeing the # of 404s continue to increase, I temporarily removed this parm last week to see if it reduces this now static number of 404s.

Google Webmaster tools started showing a ton of soft 404s that kept increasing, while SEO Moz didn't show any of those 404s. I didn't pay much attention to GWT since Google kept saying it won't affect our rankings, and nothing was showing up on SEO Moz. Last week a fraction of those 404s showed up and I am not sure if that's what lowered our Moz rank or what looks like a possible delinking from Linked In and a higher ranking complimentary website directly related to our field itsallaboutyoga.

Looking at the Moz graph of "Total Linking Root Domains Over Time" all of our competitors took a similar % hit since between June and the end of July, so I am thinking its more wide based than fat fingered mistake.

I fixed # 2, (have to still figure out what to do with most of those 404s, thinking of submitting a request to Google vs 1,000s of 301s) so in doing my review of this sequence of events and using it as a learning experience, where would I assign max destructive value as a percentage?

A. Ignoring GWT soft 404s in favor of SEO Moz campaign reports

B. No follow from Linked In and related industry site

C. Datafeedr, thousands of indexed products through Datafeedr that are no longer available mostly due to WP Yoast SEO fat finger error. I did have the

D. WP Yoast SEO, "Strip the category base (usually /category/) from the category URL"

E. Global Google algo change

Cheers,

Michael

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Micheal,

Sorry to hear about your issues with 404s. It's common to see a fluxuation in MozRank from index to index, although this is quite a large one. That said, it sounds like there might be a perfectly reasonable explanation, and unless you've seen a corresponding drop in rankings and traffic, it may be nothing to worry about.

Let me address each of your points one at a time.

1. Linkedin - it's my understanding that Linkedin redirects all links internally. Some links embedded in comments and posts aren't redirected, but these are still nofollowed. Linkedin gets a lot of heat for this, but they probably wanted to avoid getting spammed.

To my knowledge, it's been like this for quite some time.

2. Your metrics won't decrease specifically because of 404's but if your link metrics depended on those pages, then the result is the same. For example, if a page has 10 other pages linking to it, but 8 of those return a 404, then only 2 pages can pass link metrics. This will severely effect the metrics of that page. But there is no "extra" penalty for a 404.

So your drop in MozRank resulted in either new 404s that previously counted towards your score, a loss of links elsewhere on the net. Sometimes Moz just doesn't find them on every crawl. This accounts for variances between indexes. If you saw a similar pattern with your competitors, it could just be that the latest crawl covered a smaller portion of the web where your businesses exist.

If you had "NOINDEX" on the category pages, these wouldn't have counted towards your metrics anyway, so the problem probably doesn't lie there. ( I say probably, but I can't rule it out)

Based on your description, Datafeedr is a likely culprit. I really depends on how many crawled, indexed pages used to exist, that have disappeared.

In the end, it may not be a bad thing. Moz Page Rank is a rough approximation and although it is highly correlated with rankings, it's not nearly as sophisticated as Google's algorythm. Sometimes, as in the case of Panda, removing indexed pages is actually a good thing... even though this can often reduce Moz Page Rank.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.