Ranking and Domain/Page Authority
-
I'm not seeing a very good correlation between ranking and domain/page authority. Am I missing something here? ie., 2nd raning at 1/0. Also seeing competitor as "12" domain authority in "competitive domain analysis", but shows much higher here for same competitor?
<colgroup><col width="94"> <col width="171"> <col width="108"></colgroup>
| Page Authority | Page Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority |
| 70 | 40 | 83 |
| 1 | 0 | 41 |
| 51 | 3 | 97 |
| 34 | 5 | 36 |
| 41 | 3 | 52 |
| 23 | 1 | 59 |
| 59 | 49 | 100 |
| 48 | 2 | 100 |
| 52 | 6 | 77 |
| 27 | 2 | 14 |
| 1 | 0 | 57 |
| 15 | 1 | 36 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 24 | 1 | 57 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 21 | 1 | 36 | -
In my example presented, If I have competitors ranking higher with lower domain authority and page authority than my site (respectfully with domain authority having greater weight),.. What conclusions can I make around what activities or actions I should be taking to improve my site's ranking?
These metrics are to give you a quick whiff of the competition. Do they have dozens or thousands of linking roots? Are they all DA of 25 or less or are their some heavyweights in there.
In my opinion they do not provide any guidance at all on what the next job you should take to improve your site.
My conclusion would be to spend my time improving the site in ways that the visitor will appreciate and spend less time looking at these numbers.
Bottom line, if my goal is compete with other sites, how do I determine from SeoMoz metrics, what I should do to stay competitive, given low correlation?
Don't worship these numbers.
What can you do to make the visitor stay on your site more? Tweet about it? Link to it?
These numbers are not guidance on how to improve your website.
You should look at them to decide if you want to attack a keyword. Then look at them about twice a year.
-
Thank-you for your reply.
But, isn't the point of the metrics to provide the ability to evaluate your site and adjust accordingly. Otherwise, these values have little meaning. I understand the imperfection around making conclusions around Google algorithms, but if there is very little correlation with these metrics and how Google sees my site, then I can't use that data to conclude anything about the quality of my site in the eyes of the SERP.
In my example presented, If I have competitors ranking higher with lower domain authority and page authority than my site (respectfully with domain authority having greater weight), what conclusions can I make around what activities or actions I should be taking to improve my site's ranking? Why would I care about SeoMoz metrics if they aren't ultimately helping me achieve my desired result - rank higher and increase traffic.
Also remains is my question around conflicting data on domain authority change. Any reason for difference in ranking section and competitive analysis section?
Bottom line, if my goal is compete with other sites, how do I determine from SeoMoz metrics, what I should do to stay competitive, given low correlation?
-
Page authority and domain authority are SEOmoz metrics.
They are great for tracking your progress over time.
Google uses different metrics to rank websites so agreement between PA/DA and rankings generally does not occur.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Can you see if you have a penalty / downgrading for a keyword stuffed title tag ?
We’ve recently seen a gradual drop in organic listings for a site, the site has according to OSE the highest stats when compared to all its competitors. Im beginning to think the site may be being penalised for an unnatural title tag. The title tag for the site is as follows : [Service] [City] - [Company Name] - [Neighborhood] - West [City] An example of the above <title>pattern would be :</p> <p><strong>Garden Design London - Acme Design - Chelsea - West London </strong></p> <p>The other sites that are outranking this site have title tags like :</p> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><span data-mce-mark="1">#1 (INDUSTRY SITE)</span></p> </li> </ul> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#2 James Davidson Design, London</p> </li> </ul> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#3 Jane Smith : Luxury Garden Design | London | Garden Landscaping</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#4 Garden Designers London: BWI London Luxury Garden Design …</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#5 (NATIONAL NEWSPAPER ARTICLE)</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#6 Keers | High End Luxury Garden Designers in London</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#7 Garden Design London - Acme Design - Chelsea - West London (The site in question)</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#8 Sarah Franklin | Luxury Garden Design | London</p> </li> </ul> <p> </p> <p>Looking down the list they all seem to be using less keyword stuffed <title> tags than our the site sitting in #7. Bearing in mind that the site in #7 out ranks in terms of stats all other sites apart from #1 and #4 (which aren't competitors) in OSE</p> <p>Is it possible to if the site in #7 was given a penalty for the <title> tag ?</p> <p><br />(please note that the <title> tags ive listed above are representative of what the other sites are using, but ive changed the service and city to obfuscate the sites)</p></title>
Competitive Research | | mike8780 -
2 sites with low DA and PA and unoptimised <title>outranking everyone for competitive search term - How ?</title>
Im doing some keyword research for a new client, Ive found 2 anomalies for competitive search terms where sites with unoptimised <title>tags, poor backlinks and other stats, (compared to the other sites listed in the SERP) are out ranking everyone and claiming the #1 spot</p> <p> The 2 search terms are :</p> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=interior+designers+london&oq=interior+designers+london&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65j69i60j69i65l2j69i60.2784j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">Interior designers London</a>- #1 new-id.co.uk - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=new-id.co.uk&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a></p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=interior+designers+london&oq=interior+designers+london&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65j69i60j69i65l2j69i60.2784j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=interior+designer+london">Interior designer London</a>- #1 nstudio.co.uk - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnstudio.com%2F&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a></p> </li> </ul> <p> (interestingly they hardly rank at all for any modification of those search terms)</p> <p> The only thing i could think of is that they both had some really good links using that exact anchor text, but ive been checking OSE for the past month both in the backlinks and the just discovered but couldnt see anything like that.</p> <p>I conducted the SERP checking from a laptop with a broadband connection based in London, although im not very local to either of these locations im about an 8th of the cities distance away from one of those location and about half a cities distance away from the other. So i dont think its a local skew thats causing the SERP rankings.</p> <p>For both sites i can see they had old domains which now redirect to the them :</p> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><span data-mce-mark="1">New-id.co.uk = </span><span data-mce-mark="1"><a href="http://newidinteriors.com/">newidinteriors.com</a> - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnewidinteriors.com&no_redirects=1&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a> - PA1, DA1</span></p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><span data-mce-mark="1">Nstudio.co.uk = intarya.com - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=www.intarya.com&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a> - Da 32, PA43</span></p> </li> </ul> <p> Although the intarya domain was quite strong with good backlinks (but nothing above par comapred to the other sites the nstudio.co.uk site is now outranking, the anchor text was mostly natural with only some keyword anchor text from PA1 pages. </p> <p>The <a href="http://newidinteriors.com/">newidinteriors.com</a> didnt seem to have a backlink profile, both PA1 and DA1.</p> <p> Ive taken screenshots of the SERP pages below, but feel free to dig further</p> <p>Any idea what's going on here ?</p> <a download="HWkjmDf.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/HWkjmDf.png" target="_blank">HWkjmDf.png</a> <a download="A70jXse.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/A70jXse.png" target="_blank">A70jXse.png</a></title>
Competitive Research | | mike8780 -
Moz Rank /Moz Trust Tips and Tricks
I've been working on the following website (www.pleasantparkkennels.com) for about 2 years now for SEO and been able to place the site for many keywords. At times some competitors seem to come into the mix and 'just get lucky' in their rankings regardless of all the work I've done ... it seems they've implemented no SEO strategies whatsoever and yet them sometimes rank better. Upon comparing link metrics with these competitors, I seem to be doing well in most criteria but Moz Rank and Moz Trust always seems to be a category I fall short in.
Competitive Research | | MainstreamMktg
Does anyone have any resources / tips and tricks / checklists that I might be able review to assess my website for to see how I make it better. I'm running out of ideas 🙂 Thank you!0 -
Rankings & Linking Root Domains
How are the Linking Root Domains under Keyword Rankings being found? We've noticed for many of our key terms that big brands like Amazon, eBay, Home Depot, etc. only list 1 linking root domain, while much smaller competitors in our industry have hundreds. Clearly big brands are going to get more links than a company most people haven't heard of and the idea that these companies only have 1 linking root domain to a specific subcategory on their site is not believable. What's going on here?
Competitive Research | | Kingof50 -
Confused about sites ranking when compared to each other
I'm looking at the keyword "snow guards" for two competitor websites: snogem dot com (SG) snoshield dot com (SS) I've been watching these two for about 4 months. SG stays in the top 5 SERPs consistently, while SS bounces around from 15-20 on Google. I've looked at the competitive link comparison and SS appears to have a much better link profile when it comes to DA. Page specific metrics in OSE show SS with a higher mozrank, moztrust, internal followed links, linking root domains, total linking root domains, and linking C Blocks. It appears to me that SG has many more links, but their links seem to be many site wide exact match keyword links, and paid for advertisements on a major site in the metal roofing industry. Honestly the linking profile of SG surprises me that they rank so much higher than SS after the Panda/Penguin updates. I have two questions: 1. When competing against these sites, should I model SG's link profile? I'm nervous to because of my previous statement thinking they will get hit with Panda/Penguin like updates. 2. What would it take to bounce SS to competing with SG on the first page? Is the number of links the only thing this site is missing, or is there something else to focus on.
Competitive Research | | kadesmith0 -
Competitor Keyword Rankings
Is there a way within SEOMoz to uncover the keywords your competitors rank for and their respective SERPs? Thx
Competitive Research | | qiherbs.com1 -
Can anyone explain this top-10 ranking?
How on earth can http://www.plimun.com/ be at #6 for "web design", with only 15 total linking root domains, and no mention of the term in link text?! See: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.plimun.com This is one of the biggest anomalies I've ever seen.
Competitive Research | | BenHuntLtd1 -
Twitter as a website's #2 ranked linked page?
A site I'm researching on open-site explorer has a #2 link with page authority of 52 and Domain authority of 97, and that link is the site's twitter page. No other sites I've researched have had their twitter page show up in it's link rankings like this, can someone explain?
Competitive Research | | TheSquareFoot0