Why would a site w/lower metrics across the board have the highest DA?
-
We are competing with other national brands and have a competitor who is NOT a national brand and who does NOT have any metrics ranking higher. With the latest SEOMoz metric update this week, they (hawaiianjewelryshop) now have the highest DA in Link Analysis. Has anyone else experienced this? Can SEOMoz explain this for us, please? It would be great if Matt Peters would respond to this question.
The sites in question are:
www.nahoku.com
www.mauidivers.com
www.hawaiianjewelryshop.com
www.jared.com -
Hi JP Moulin,
Thanks for your question. Rand and The Back Burner already did a good job explaining some things about PA/DA so I'll stick to looking at the numbers.
I looked at the top level metrics for these four sites in Open Site Explorer:
Site PA DA # Linking Root domains # Links
www.nahoku.com 51 41 196 3695
www.mauidivers.com 53 43 228 4274
www.jared.com 59 51 283 871
www.hawaiianjewelryshop.com 60 52 325 5890
These look pretty well ordered based on these numbers to me (more links + linking domains => higher PA/DA) with the possible exception of www.jared.com which is a bit of an outlier with 283 linking root domains and only 871 links. In this case, the domain links are boosting it's PA/DA. The new model prefers metrics associated with link diversity/domain signals (linking root domains, linking C-blocks, etc) over the old one and this is what's happening with www.jared.com.
-
Well, first, DA is only a small part of SEOMoz campaigns. Personally I use the competitive analysis to monitor the links my competition are getting, the ranking report to track SERP performance, and the Error report to track and fix on-site issues. Those are the areas where the monthly fee really pays for itself, in my opinion.
And again, if you're beating your competition in rankings, then I would worry less about their DA and more about converting all that extra traffic you get into sales.
-
Some good things to know about DA: - It's using an algorithm that examines PA across a domain - It's not a perfect metric by any means (though it is, on average, the best correlated domain-wide metric for estimating a site's performance in Google's SERPs) - The range of correlations is in the 0.15-0.25 area depending on the index update and on Google's changes, so we're still talking about something that only explains a small portion of why a site may rank (page-level factors, anchor text, user/usage data, social data, personalization, goegraphy, etc. are not taken into account) - When a site's DA is higher, but other metrics are lower, it probably has something to do with the link distribution across the site and/or the types of links pointing at the site. That said, definitely will ask Matt to jump in here and have a look. In terms of your request for a $100/month service having better accuracy - as I noted, DA is the best metric we've seen (or any webmaster/SEO I know has seen/measured). It's incredibly hard to build a link index, very hard to calculate a link graph, and then super tough to build a ranking model against thousands of Google's results. I agree that we should be better and we're always working toward that (see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/introducing-seomoz-updated-page-authority-and-domain-authority); this is just an insanely hard problem, due to the massive technology and algorithmic requirements involved in understanding and mathematically quantifying how Google ranks pages.
-
Thanks The Back Burner. The site does not rank higher than us for the targeted keyword, but their DA blows us out of the water. I think (very roughly) is a fair assessment, but how can you use the SEOMoz report (if it's so off) to come up with a strategic plan? I would expect this sort of variance from a free service, but not one that is $100/mo. I look forward to Matt Peter's response.
-
Does this site rank higher than you for your targeted keywords?
I checked out www.nahoku.com and if "hawaiian slipper" is one of your keywords (it's in your page title) then there's no reason to worry - you rank #2 and hawaiianjewelryshop.com doesn't even show up in the top ten.
Building higher DA is good, but as long as you are ranking well for the keyword terms you want to target then you're doing well.
Remember that DA is for reference only - it is most useful as a high-level way to quickly gauge (very roughly) where a site stands.
In the end the only thing that matters for your site is whether you are ranking highly for the terms you want to target and converting the traffic you get from those keywords into sales.
-
Thanks gmkrish for that resource. I would love to hear from the engineers. I love the summary screens but they don't seem insightful at all. Would the better way be to go through OSE, export to spreadsheet, and sort by different metrics for each competitor? Seems like a lot of work for this kind of insight.
-
I too love to hear from SEOMOZ team. In the meantime you may read the answer from Randy for a question related to Domain authority.
http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/32040/what-are-the-component-metrics-of-domain-authority
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
-
Need advise/strategy for cleaning up backlinks to my site
I recently redesigned my website (studio35design.com), and with that, I'm finally paying attention to SEO. I used a few different tools to find the amount of backlinking domains I've built up through the 7 or so years. The numbers are the following: 52 Total Backlinking Domains (800+ links):
Moz Pro | | rubennunez
• 17 of those are from blog commenting - they are pretty much all NF
• 20 of those are from sitewide footer credits on websites I've built. They are all old, as I stopped adding sitewide links to my client sites over a year ago.
• 7 of those are from spam. My site was hacked last year which contributed to alot of it. I've since then completely scrapped my old site and built this one on webflow (Not self-hosted like my old WP site).
• The other 10 or so are from forums, and the odd photo credit. As you can tell, almost none of these backlinks links are really any good. I'm surprised that my DA is 27 really. So moving forward, I need to know the best strategy dealing with these "bad" links. For the spam, I'm going to disavow in google webmasters. As for the rest, here are my questions... QUESTION 1:
As for the sitewide links, would the best thing be to remove the link altogether from the footer of each one of those sites? Some I can't because they are really old, and I don't have access to them (I'll probably disavow), but the rest I can still go in and update. QUESTION 2:
Will removing a ton of links at once hurt my DA and my google ranking? I can probably eliminate 500-600 links within a few days just by removing the sitewide links. How quickly can I expect those links to drop off? A few months? QUESTIONS 3:
Should I disavow blog commenting links even though they are NF? Does it matter at all? QUESTION 4:
I noticed 5 or so of the domains I have links one aren't working domains anymore. How quickly can I expect those links to drop off? Thanks in advance for your help.0 -
Best Metrics but Consistently Outranked
I am hoping someone could help us determine why we generally rank quite poorly compared to our competition, despite leading in every single Competitive Metric. We get outranked on a term where the Page Grade gives us an "A", and we best the competitor on each of the metrics. Where would those with more experience suggest we start looking? rank.jpg
Moz Pro | | Yardboy0 -
How to remove broken links from our wordpress site?
Hello! How are you? We just signed up to Moz.com. Moz link tool. It gave us many broken links with 404's and 302's. Could you please help me with deleting the links? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | hsma0 -
Having 1 page crawl error on 2 sites
Help! A few weeks back, my dev team did some "changes" (that I don't know anything about), but ever since then, my Moz crawl has only shown one page for either http://betamerica.com or http://fanex.com. Moz service was helpful in talking about a redirect loop that existed, and I asked my team to fix it, which it looks to me like they have. Still, 1 page. I used SEO Book's spider tool and it also only sees 1 page, and sees the sites as http://https://betamerica.com (for example), which is just weird. I don't know enough about HT Access or server stuff to figure out what's going on, so if someone can help me figure that out, I'd appreciate it.
Moz Pro | | BetAmerica0 -
Site Redesign Launch - How Can I crawl for immediate review
Just redesigned my site and want to have a crawl done to check for errors or any items which need to be cleaned up. Anyone know how I can do this as SEOMoz only crawls once per week. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | creativemobseo0 -
Looking for Advice on SEO for Minimilistic Site
Hi everyone, I found this site and it looks like a great place for us to start, we have just opened the doors to our new website fenwaymedia thats a dot co dot uk. Now Ihave tried to maintain the most minimilistic design throughout but I believe with this comes certain drawbacks - - - - S E O which is why i am here. My thought were that I would draw my clients from the Web Design, web Marketing & Blog page which I will starting in 3 hours be constantly updating. but Im not sure Im doing the right thing. I am trying to target Edinburgh, Scotland although we would take work from anywhere, if anyone could spare us a moment, I would greatly appreciate any help, tips or comments that might help us attain some visibility. Thanks in advance and thanks for looking. Kind regards, Craig
Moz Pro | | fenwaymedia0 -
Compare link metrics - What time frame is this in?
Hi, I'm comparing three sites and one of them I know is quite popular however a few of the social statistics are puzzling me; they've got a small amount of Facebook likes and times shared on twitter - Which just can't be right if it's all time. What's the time frame of this data? The last three months or? Thanks, Dan
Moz Pro | | Sparkstone0 -
OPen Site Explorer listing criteria?
Checking link data for a potential client who has given me access to their websmaster tools account, I've noticed that Google list over 150,000 "Links to Your Site" but yet OSE only reports a tiny fraction of this number.
Moz Pro | | G-DC
I have manually verified that there are in fact direct links from the sites that are listed in Webmaster Tools but not in OSE. Does OSE discard some links? Is there a reporting lag? Does anyone know why there would be such a large discrepancy?0