Spam Directories creating misleading Authority ratings

[paulsmithlondon]

How does the website www.starsdirectory.com.ar get a Domain Authority of 54 and a Page Authority of 61 when Google quite correctly gives it a PR 0?

It is clearly a spam directory, which Google has recognised.

It is very misleading using OSE or Campaign Management when sites such as these (and there are hundreds more we have found) are skewing the results of competitiors through the use of spam links.

Is there no way that SEOMoz tools can identify such spam sites when they create their ratings?

[DanDeceuster]

That is an awful directory. None of the entries in the categories I looked at were even close, they were all over the place. Google has figured this out I would guess because of a very high number of reciprocal links. Most spammy directories require a reciprocal link to be included, so they likely have several hundred or even thousands of domains linking to them. Google would naturally penalize this. OSE doesn't seem to have a way to categorize reciprocal links, but that would be very incredible if they could.

Imagine being able to see your followed links, nofollowed links, and right in there with it, your reciprocal links. Then they could reduce the authority of sites with over 90% reciprocal links or something. Would be good for an SEO to know as well especially when taking over a website you haven't done work on before. That's good info.