OSE: Missing back-links and High DA website with low DA backlinks

[vtmoz]

I have gone through a website with 81 DA; where its link equity back-links with highest DA of 70. Hardly 5 back-links 60 to 70 DA and just 25 root domains. This seems very unusual to me. Can someone clarify this for me? Can a website with low DA back-links can make high DA? If so what could be other major contributing factors for this?

[BlueCorona]

Hi VtigerCRM!

Domain authority is made up of multiple factors, but just backlinks to the website. Here’s a good way to think of it: today’s SEO world is about quality, not quantity. For example, it’s not about how many links you can get to point back to your site—it’s about how good those links are. One link from a reputable, authoritative website is better than 20 links from a spammy website or site with a domain authority of 2. And although it seems daunting to a lot of people, there are ways to legitimately link build—guest blogging, broken link building, link requests, and even outbound linking

In a May 2013 video right before Penguin 2.0 rolled out, Matt Cutts put it pretty well: “We’re doing a better job of detecting when someone is sort of an authority in a specific space—you know, it could be medical, it could be travel, whatever—and trying to make sure that those rank a little more highly if you’re some sort of authority or a site that according to the algorithms we think might be a little bit more appropriate for users.”

Here are the most important SEO success tips (a lot of your competitors are probably using these tips already, so it’s time you joined in):

• Valuable content
• Outbound linking
• Blogging
• Social media

Along with building your backlink profile with quality backlinks, continue creating content that demonstrates you are the authority in this field.

[tawnycase]

Hi there! Tawny from Moz's Customer Support  team here.

Domain Authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. It is made up of an aggregate of metrics (MozRank,MozTrust, general link profile, and more) that each have an impact on this score. it can be difficult to directly influence your DA, but one way to move toward increasing it would be to improve your overall SEO. A great place to start with that could be to focus on link building! You can learn more about link building here and get a more detailed explanation of Domain Authority through this resource.

In general, I'd recommend keeping in mind that all of these metrics are relative with respect to the other sites included in our index. The metrics will probably have some additional context when compared to sites similar to your own, including your competitors.

Open Site Explorer and the Link Analysis page of campaigns are both tied to our Mozscape index, which tends to update roughly once a month.

Just a few points on how we compile our index:

• We grab the most recent index.
• We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains).
• We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled ~130 billion URLs

The idea here is that we're focusing on the highest-quality links we can find, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we're aiming to report the most valuable ones available!

Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many reasons - including the crawl-ability of sites, the number of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories.

You can see our most recently updated schedule here as well as some more technical metrics on our Mozscape API Updates page. You can also see when the last and next updates happened on the Open Site Explorer (OSE) homepage at any time.

Since Moz focuses on quality of links over quantity, we are always focused on the most relevant links to display to our users. It's possible that Moz's index will leave out some of the lower-quality (non-link juice providing) links out of our index because of this. So, that might explain why you may see some discrepancies with what other tools may be showing.

Rand does a great job of breaking down how to interpret DA fluctuations through this post. Give it a once over to see if it helps clarify some of your questions! I hope this helps!