Sudden decrease in Moz Page rank
-
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
-
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.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
MOZ Pro - Page Grader Queries
Greetings! I started a new position last week and the extremely supportive director promised to give me anything I required to make my job easier. Of course, my first port of call was MOZ Pro. Having never used MOZ Pro before, I've just been getting to grips with it, fixing any pressing issues and giving the whole site a general SEO health check. A few fairly major issues have been flagged, which I'm in the process of fixing, and I'm currently putting our main landing pages through the MOZ Page Grader. After a little bit of tinkering, our iPhone 6 cases page has been graded B for the term 'iPhone 6 cases', but I have a few queries/concerns regarding some of the suggested fixes: **Avoid keyword stuffing in document **- The term 'iphone 6 cases' only appears thrice in the body, so it can't be that? The term, however, appears 23 times in the page's img alt tags. Could this be the issue? This is an ecommerce site that sells iPhone 6 cases, so the img alt tags are bound to contain that keyword. Each img alt tag is unique, so I don't really know what I can do here? "Show details for YouSave iPhone 6 0.6mm Clear Gel Case" is the example of the img alt tag of one of the products on that page, surely I can't remove the words 'iPhone 6 case'? Avoid too many internal links - MOZ suggests keeping the internal links to below 100 or, at a minimum, less than 100 links on the main navigation menu. I haven't counted, but I'd guess that page has more than 100 links, but not too many on the navigation menu. To me, this looks like a standard ecommerce page, with links to products and different pages via the top and bottom menus. Would I improve visibility if I reduced the amount of links by, say, reducing the number of products on the page? We currently have it set to 36, but can easily be reduced. Only One Canonical URL - We've put a fix in place for this issue and are just waiting for it to go live. For some reason rel=canonical tags have been duplicated on the majority of the pages. Like I say, this is being remedied, but I just wondered whether a duplicate tag negatively affect the page's visibility? The tags are identical and just point to the page they're on. I think that's about it for now! Thanks in advance and keep up the good work! Cheers, Lewis (Andrew is the name of the director) UPDATE Now I've sorted the rel=canonical issue, the pages are being graded A but still with the first two suggestions above.
Moz Pro | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
High DA, PA and A grade at page level not ranking in SERP - why?
I ran a full keyword ranking report against my competitors. My site clearly tops all KPIs with highest DA, PA, mT/mR etc. My page also get's an A for page otimisation, but is ranking lower than sites with an F. There have been no manual actions and I am at a loss to explain why the page isn't ranking. Any advice would be appreciated. Cheers
Moz Pro | | metacoach0 -
[Moz Help] Re: Trying to add a valid URL into MOZ account
See below and pls let us know what we have to do solve this : | | Joel Day (Moz Help) Mar 07 05:03 PM Hey Tracy, It looks like there's a redirect loop on your site. greatwesternflooring.com redirects to www.greatwesternflooring.com/ which in turn 302 redirects back into itself. You'll likely need to fix the redirect before you can continue configuring the campaign. 🙂 Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Britewave
Joel. Moz
t: @HelpWizard | | | Tracy Mar 07 03:14 PM I sent an email, and this is the response I got. The help forum sent me here, so here I am 🙂 An answer was posted to this question:
Question I have a valid URL greatwesternflooring.com, but when I try to add this campaign I get an "opps" message telling me it's not a valid URL. Can you help me? Answer
This looks like a bug. Please reach out to us via support so that we can forward this along to our Developers for review. Thanks!(https://mza.seotoolninja.com/help/contact)
See where this question was originally asked. |0 -
Crawl results on keyword rankings differ from actual search rankings
For the second week in a row, the weekly keyword rankings in my MOZ account show "not in top 50" for most keywords. However, when I check some of my rankings I still broadly have the rankings that I used to have. It seems that the MOZ crawl is experiencing some difficulties. Does anyone have suggestions how to find out what's going on? If I can't rely on the crawl outcomes, then the tool is not very useful anymore!
Moz Pro | | matteis0 -
Rankings Different in Serps from Report
My site shows up on page one for many search queries, but I'm "not in the top 50" for those same terms according to the rankings report. Having troubleshooted the problem, it may be a canonical issue. I did not include www when I originally set up my reports and it seems that my site shows up in search results with www. However; if you type in the url without the www, it will automatically forward to the page with www. I did this intentionally in order not to get penalized for duplicate content pages. So here's my question: If I've got one page redirected to the other, shouldn't the rankings report also follow that redirect? If so, then it should show the correct results, right? Thanks, Dino
Moz Pro | | Dino640 -
Article Directory Page Rank 7
Hi Guys, Would I be correct in my assumption that if I submitted articles to this directory: www . thefreelibrary.com I would recieve a link back to my site of PR7. Could this be correct? Any help with this and any information on Article Directories worth submitting in would be great. Thank for looking, Craig
Moz Pro | | fenwaymedia1 -
Problem with Rankings and On-page Optimization
Hi SEOZ 🙂 I have a question regarding the Rankings and On-page Optimization in the seomoz Campaign Manager. I have setup a website url for examle: www.keyword.com After that created a list of all the target Keywords, that I want to reach within my Website: keyword-a, keyword-b, keyword-c and so on... Then I did a On-Page Analysis for all the urls with the specific keywords. keyword-a: www.keyword.com/keyword-a/ keyword-b: www.keyword.com/keyword-b/ keyword-c: www.keyword.com/keyword-c/ and so on... Most of the urls got the A grade. Now after the Website hast launched and got crawled, I have a problem with the Rankings and the On-page Optimization. The Rankings for my Keywords and also the Grades at the On-page Optimization are only shown for my Start/Homepage: www.keyword.com NOT for the urls that are specific for a Keyword for example: www.keyword.com/keyword-a/ Also the Grades are shown for the Keywords but again only in combination with my Start/Homepage www.keyword.com NOT for www.keyword.com/keyword-a/ What is the problem? Bye, Alex
Moz Pro | | krseo0 -
Fixing the Too Many On-Page Links
In our campaign I see that it reported that some of our pages have too many on-page links. But I think most of the links that was seen by MozBot is related to our images. There are a lot of images in our site and at the same time we support 11 languages which adds additional links One of the pages that have a lot of links is www.florahospitality.com/dining.aspx What can you <a></a>suggest to fix this? Thanks. <a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a>
Moz Pro | | shebinhassan0