Domain Authority

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I wanted to find out if anyone knew how to discover why DA may have dropped? Ours has gone from 26 to 25 - I know it's not much, but I wanted to find the reason.

One thing which happened was our developer company wiped redirects, which did impact rankings - would this also have affected domain authority or do I need to review our backlinks again?

Thank you

[LoganRay]

When you remove redirects, you also effectively remove any links pointing to your site that pass through those redirects. For this reason, it's not usually recommended that redirects are removed. Something I do to track which redirects are actually being hit, is adding source/medium UTMs to the resolving URL of my redirects - see example below. This pushes data into Google Analytics and allows me to see which redirects I don't need (i.e., if they don't show up in GA reports after a specified time frame), and which ones are still active.

Example of 301 redirect with source/medium UTMs:/my-old-URL >>> /my-new-URL?utm_source=/my-old-URL&utm_medium=301

That being said, if you had some high quality links passing through any of those redirects, it could certainly cause a drop in DA.

[BeckyKey]

Hi Logan,

Thank you for the reply.

These weren't removed intentionally and have been put back as they were. However I'm just concerned about the fall out from this.

The issue was that rather than redirecting, they had removed 301's so the new URL was a 404 and the URLs reverted back to their old structure.

We shouldn't have lost any backlinks, I wasn't sure if it could be something else

Thanks!

[LoganRay]

How long were the redirects down? Were there any other site changes that occurred around the time of the DA drp?

[BeckyKey]

They were down from 27th November to 24th December.

The issue with our redirects came from our entire web catalogue being deleted - another glitch when developers were working on something unrelated.

So between 27th Nov - 30th Nov the whole website apart from the homepage was pretty much gone.

Pretty big issues, which will take some time to rectify.

Thank you

[LoganRay]

That's definitely long enough for search engines (and Moz DA) to notice and react accordingly. Best of luck to you in your climb back up!

[BeckyKey]

Thought so! Thank you for the feedback