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
-
What is the relationship between inbound links and linking domains?
In doing competitor research, there's a specific competitor that has fewer linking domains, but dramatically more inbound links. How do these two relate to each other? I do have a higher domain authority and more internal followed links with them having more internal nofollow and external (both follow and nofollow) links. I'm trying to understand how they can have 3.7k linking domains and 4.8 million inbound links while I have 4.1k linking domains and only 601k inbound links. What really defines an inbound link and what's there relationship between inbound links and linking domains?
Competitive Research | | grayloon0 -
(Need helps here!) Can homepage and other internal pages (services) rank high together on Google?
Hi Moz community, Recently I am working on our website's SEO. Our company is a marketing agency. We provide general marketing services and also web design. Here is the content of our homepage and internal pages (specific services). Homepage (marketing agency) Internal page #1 (XXX marketing service) Internal page #2 (YYY marketing service) Internal page #3 (web design) I suggest to my supervisor that we could make some improvement and optimize different keywords for these 4 pages, respectively (homepage, internal page #1 #2 #3). However, my supervisor holds a different point of view that homepage and internal page#3 cannot rank both high for their own keywords because web design is not as related to marketing. So I did some research and look for some top-ranking marketing agency guys who also offer web design. I found their internal pages about web design service rank pretty bad for their own web-design-related keywords. Here are my thoughts and guess (please correct me if I am wrong): Google takes everything into account and deems web design to be kind of irrelevant content to the website, so the internal page for web design will not rank high. The internal page has so much lower power than the homepage so it got outranked by the guys whose homepages are all about web design and development. My question is: In above case, can homepage and other internal pages (our services) all rank high together for their own keywords? I know what I wrote is kind of confusing...But I really need help here and want to solve this problem badly. Really appreciate any help!! Thank you in advance! Best, Raymond
Competitive Research | | Raymondlee0 -
Why is this page ranking #2?
Hello, I am hoping someone can shed a bit of light on why this page http://www.leveragerx.com/physician-mortgages is ranking #2 for "physician loans"? It isn't optimized for that keyword and PA is only 1, DA is 9. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | myriad_ricardo0 -
Can deceptive ads help sites to rank? Pogosticking effect involved...
Hello,
Competitive Research | | fablau
I have a question for you. I have noticed that many music sites that appear in the first top results for keywords our users search for, include all the same ads that deceive people by inviting them to "Download" or get the "Full Album" of what people may be search for. Look at the following websites that are often displayed at the first spots for keywords like "Christmas Sheet Music" (just an example): [....] They all have, most of the times, the same ads. Look at the following screenshots taken from the sites above (the ads are at the top of the page): http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/google/Shot1.jpg
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/google/Shot2.jpg Those deceptive ads could engage users more than legitimate websites not showing those ads or not showing ads at all, making Google think that people are more engaged on those website showing those deceptive ads. If it is quality that Google is looking for, shouldn't they do something to avoid having sites ranking well just because of some deceptive ads that take users into action, but without any useful result? I am eager to know your ideas on this issue. Thanks! Fab.0 -
SEO ranking question
Hey, If a site for had a series of articles, and had the privilege of guest posting on several sites, such as mashable, entrepreuner.com, inc.com, and a few other not as big sites. and let us also say that this site is new and currently has pagerank of 0. How would the above benefit the site and the visibility of the articles on google? Also, with guest-posting, is it problematic to have the exact article also on your site? thanks in advance!
Competitive Research | | Raz.0 -
Decent domain authority score with no links other than their own linking back to them. How is that possible?
Hello everyone I just spotted the following 'abnormality' while doing a little link analysis with Open Search Explorer. I checked out a site that has a domain authority score of 35, when the only domain linking back to them is ''the site itself'. They happen to have a domain authority of 35 themselves, but no other links pointing back to them apart from their own and yet they have the same authority as other sites with twice the amount of content and an actual backlink profile. How is that possible? 🙂 Links and authority scores, stills baffles me...
Competitive Research | | Hermski0 -
Moz metrics / PageRank Incoherence
I'm checking some domains/pages where I could acquire some links, but I'm seeing huge differences between Moz metrics and PageRank and I'm hesitant about the meaning of it.. Given that PR was updated recently, is it safe to assume tons of crappy inbound links or a penalization by Google? Here is an example: Page Authority: 60
Competitive Research | | Branagan
Page MozRank: 6.0
Page MozTrust: 6.0
Domain Authority: 50
Domain MozRank: 4.0
Domain MozTrust: 4.0 Google PageRank: 1 Any clues?
Cheers!1 -
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