Why would a site w/lower metrics across the board have the highest DA?

[NaHoku]

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

[Matthew_Peters]

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.

[eTundra]

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.

[randfish]

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.

[NaHoku]

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.

[eTundra]

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.

[NaHoku]

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.

[gmk1567]

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