OSE: Missing back-links and High DA website with low DA backlinks
-
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?
-
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.
-
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!
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
-
Links to non-exisiting pages
Hi, I have tons of incoming links to target pages on my website that do not exist. If you follow the link you get a 404 error.
Link Explorer | | FoodJEtThe anchor text is always a "spammy" non related text. Does anyone know what is happening and how to get rid or block these links? Thanks, Dirk
0 -
DA score Decreased but Linking Domains Improved
Hi, I have observed that even if number of linking domains increased but DA value can still decreased. Can anyone Please let me know how to improve DA score. Focusing on gaining quality backlinks is already in process and number of linking domains also increased over the last 2 months but DA score got down. Website - https://valueofficefurniture.com.au/ Awaiting responses!
Link Explorer | | insidewebanalytics
Thanks. pt3y1n pt3ycl0 -
Disavow 60% of the external links?
Hi guys, We just discovered that our website got a 16% Spam Score based on MOZ reports, while less than 1 year ago we had a good 1% if I'm not mistaken. Therefore we ran an audit of the external links to our website and discovered that about 60% of them are irrelevant such as: referral page not available anymore (or not found, or domain not accessible) irrelevant web directories for our business Impossible to contact the owner of these pages or remove the links towards our website.
Link Explorer | | Andreea-M
Is the Disavow tool an acceptable option in this case? Could this lower our Spam Score and make a better impression in "Google's eyes"? 60% seems quite a lot of backlinks, but they are also not relevant, and we want to focus on creating better quality referrals in the next months. I would really appreciate an opinion on this, and how would you proceed in this case.0 -
Drop in DA and PA and lost a load of links
Hi Mozzers, I just check a site in OSE and while the inbound domains are up the total links have dropped and therefore DA and PA. How can I find which links have gone. I'm assuming a domain passing 1000's of links has either gone down or broken the link - can I use the ISE tool to fine which links have been recently broken? I know there is just discovered for new links. If not can you recommend a tool please. Thanks
Link Explorer | | Bush_JSM0 -
DA/PA Fluctuations: How to Interpret, Apply, & Understand These ML-Based Scores
Howdy folks, Every time we do an index update here at Moz, we get a tremendous number of questions about Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) scores fluctuating. Typically, each index (which release approximately monthly), many billions of sites will see their scores go up, while others will go down. If your score has gone up or down, there are many potential influencing factors: You've earned relatively more or less links over the course of the last 30-90 days.
Link Explorer | | randfish
Remember that, because Mozscape indices take 3-4 weeks to process, the data collected in an index is between ~21-90 days old. Even on the day of release, the newest link data you'll see was crawled ~21 days ago, and can go as far back as 90 days (the oldest crawlsets we include in processing). If you've done very recent link growth (or shrinkage) that won't be seen by our index until we've crawled and processed the next index. You've earned more links, but the highest authority sites have grown their link profile even more
Since Domain and Page Authority are on a 100-page scale, the very top of that represents the most link-rich sites and pages, and nearly every index, it's harder and harder to get these high scores and sites, on average, that aren't growing their link profiles substantively will see PA/DA drops. This is because of the scaling process - if Facebook.com (currently with a DA of 100) grows its link profile massively, that becomes the new DA 100, and it will be harder for other sites that aren't growing quality links as fast to get from 99 to 100 or even from 89 to 90. This is true across the scale of DA/PA, and makes it critical to measure a site's DA and a page's PA against the competition, not just trended against itself. You could earn loads of great links, and still see a DA drop due to these scaling types of features. Always compare against similar sites and pages to get the best sense of relative performance, since DA/PA are relative, not absolute scores. The links you've earned are from places that we haven't seen correlate well with higher Google rankings
PA/DA are created using a machine-learning algorithm whose training set is search results in Google. Over time, as Google gets pickier about which types of links it counts, and as Mozscape picks up on those changes, PA/DA scores will change to reflect it. Thus, lots of low quality links or links from domains that don't seem to influence Google's rankings are likely to not have a positive effect on PA/DA. On the flip side, you could do no link growth whatsoever and see rising PA/DA scores if the links from the sites/pages you already have appear to be growing in importance in influencing Google's rankings. We've done a better or worse job crawling sites/pages that have links to you (or don't)
Moz is constantly working to improve the shape of our index - choosing which pages to crawl and which to ignore. Our goal is to build the most "Google-shaped" index we can, representative of what Google keeps in their main index and counts as valuable/important links that influence rankings. We make tweaks aimed at this goal each index cycle, but not always perfectly (you can see that in 2015, we crawled a ton more domains, but found that many of those were, in fact, low quality and not valuable, thus we stopped). Moz's crawlers can crawl the web extremely fast and efficiently, but our processing time prevents us from building as large an index as we'd like and as large as our competitors (you will see more links represented in both Ahrefs and Majestic, two competitors to Mozscape that I recommend). Moz calculates valuable metrics that these others do not (like PA/DA, MozRank, MozTrust, Spam Score, etc), but these metrics require hundreds of hours of processing and that time scales linearly with the size of the index, which means we have to stay smaller in order to calculate them. Long term, we are building a new indexing system that can process in real time and scale much larger, but this is a massive undertaking and is still a long time away. In the meantime, as our crawl shape changes to imitate Google, we may miss links that point to a site or page, and/or overindex a section of the web that points to sites/pages, causing fluctuations in link metrics. If you'd like to insure that a URL will be crawled, you can visit that page with the Mozbar or search for it in OSE, and during the next index cycle (or, possibly 2 index cycles depending on where we are in the process), we'll crawl that page and include it. We've found this does not bias our index since these requests represent tiny fractions of a percent of the overall index (<0.1% in total). My strongest suggestion if you ever have the concern/question "Why did my PA/DA drop?!" is to always compare against a set of competing sites/pages. If most of your competitors fell as well, it's more likely related to relative scaling or crawl biasing issues, not to anything you've done. Remember that DA/PA are relative metrics, not absolute! That means you can be improving links and rankings and STILL see a falling DA score, but, due to how DA is scaled, the score in aggregate may be better predictive of Google's rankings. You can also pay attention to our coverage of Google metrics, which we report with each index, and to our correlations with rankings metrics. If these fall, it means Mozscape has gotten less Google-shaped and less representative of what influences rankings. If they rise, it means Mozscape has gotten better. Obviously, our goal is to consistently improve, but we can't be sure that every variation we attempt will have universally positive impacts until we measure them. Thanks for reading through, and if you have any questions, please leave them for us below. I'll do my best to follow up quickly.13 -
Where can I see the list of the new backlinks reported?
In my dashboard I see a +875 in external links. Now they are 1,130. This sounds worrying rother than good news! I'd like to get an explaination but how can I see where these links come from? And when? How can be explained a steep increase in the link count from the last index? Also, a minor question, where can I find the increase percentage? I am able to see only the absolute count.
Link Explorer | | 2mlab0 -
Why won't Open Site Explorer detect inbound links from big name websites?
I understand smaller, spammy sites woudn't get indexed, but some of the websites linking to mine have high domain authorities. The website is a parked subdomain.
Link Explorer | | myers3680 -
Why moz pro detects inexistent links?
I have a campaign in moz pro to my personal webpage for testing purposes and also a bit of learning. But i have a question: On link -> Link analysis i can see this: http://maqui.darkbolt.net/project/chat/index.php 404http://maqui.darkbolt.net/project/docs/index.php 404http://maqui.darkbolt.net/project/down/index.php 404http://maqui.darkbolt.net/project/foto/index.php 404http://maqui.darkbolt.net/project/news/index.php?news=1 404http://maqui.darkbolt.net/project/project/index.php 404http://maqui.darkbolt.net/project/ro/index.php 404http://maqui.darkbolt.net/project/who/index.php 404Obviously all these address doesn't exist. There are links on the page project/index.php linking to, for example, /chat/index.php.How can i resolve this problem on the stats? There's something bad really on the page? As i can see all links on the page are working properly.
Link Explorer | | Er_Maqui0