Flauctuating number of Internal Equity-Passing Links affecting DA
-
My site has a high number of fluctuating internal equity passing links in open site explorer from month to month, theses range from 30 000 and sometimes as high as 1,million. The fluctuations occur even when I have made no changes onsite. I have noticed that when the internal equity passing links are very high the DA drops and when they are low the DA is high, has anyone ever experienced this with open site explorer ?
-
Thanks for the response. It does make sense but I will also send the site in question just to make sure you can the best idea of what I mean. Thanks
-
Hi there,
Sam from Moz's Help Team here!
It's hard to pinpoint what could be happening here without a specific example/side by side comparison, but there could be a variety of things coming into play in terms of why you're seeing such dramatic fluctuations. One of these could be that in Open Site Explorer, you might be alternating between looking at the results for 'this page'/'this subdomain'/'this root domain' - all of which could present wildly different results. It's also completely normal to see fluctuations in DA and the number of links because sample sizes and sources fluctuate in each index update. Rand actually wrote a really great summation of the reasons for DA drops here, but I'll summarise below for you:
1.You've earned relatively more or less links over the course of the last 30-90 days.
2. You've earned more links, but the highest authority sites have grown their link profile even more.
3. The links you've earned are from places that we haven't seen correlate well with higher Google rankings.
4. We've done a better or worse job crawling sites/pages that have links to you (or don't).We collect our link index data by starting our crawler on a few highest ranking sites and letting it perform a breadth first search to see what it finds. For each page that we crawl, we first collect each of it’s links before following these and collecting the details of each page that these link to and so on. There’s a set limit of links that we’ll crawl per page and pages that we’ll crawl per site so it’s expected that we may not follow every link on your site this way and the results may change from index to index. Other things could affect our ability to find certain links within your site from index to index, such as 404/server errors etc - any potential problem within your site at the time we crawled it that prevented us from finding the links we otherwise would have.
I hope this helps - if you have any other questions, feel free to pop a message over to help@moz.com with a specific website example and we can dive in and see what we can figure out:).
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
-
Moz's new Link Explorer, including our revamped index and DA/PA scores is now open to everyone!
Hey Moz Community, Link Explorer is now open to the public! Everyone can access it via a subscription or a free Moz ‘Community’ account. As you may know by now, the brand-new Link Explorer tool is primed to replace Open Site Explorer as Moz’s link building and analysis tool. The Link Explorer project is the result of an incredible amount of perseverance and hard work by the team, and we’re proud to be able to finally share it with you — we know it’s going to revolutionize how you approach link building and make your job easier. You can read more about the tool here in Sarah Bird’s announcement post. Because Link Explorer improves on almost every aspect of Open Site Explorer, the metrics have improved, too. That means you’re likely going to see some Domain Authority and Page Authority discrepancies between OSE’s index and Link Explorer’s index. We definitely suggest you use the new DA/PA from Link Explorer, as they’re more accurate and refresh daily rather than monthly, as was the case with OSE’s index. However, we also realize that many of you use these metrics to report to your clients and colleagues, and a sudden change or fluctuation could potentially make your job harder. Which DA is the real DA? The new DA is based on a much larger index that has many improvements, several of which are designed to make the index more like Google’s than ever before. You should consider moving towards the new DA (and the old DA won’t be updated after April 26th 2018, so the sooner the better). While there will be fluctuations as we improve the model and add features to the index, we expect it to remain largely stable and to be a far more accurate picture of a site’s authority according to how it’s seen by Google. Why is Link Explorer’s DA/PA considered better than OSE’s, and which should I trust? The larger link index with improved crawl selection allows us to produce a stronger model that includes a much larger proportion of the web. That being said, DA and PA should always be considered in the context of your competitors. A drop in PA or DA relative to the old OSE is of little concern if your competitors saw similar movement. Is Domain Authority/Page Authority an absolute score or a relative one? Both DA and PA are relative to the Internet as a whole. If Facebook acquired a billion new links, everyone’s PA and DA would drop relative to Facebook. Because of this, it’s always best to look at PA and DA in comparison to your competitors. What does a drop/raise in DA mean in Link Explorer vs OSE? How can I explain this to my clients when I’m reporting it? DA and PA should always be considered in the context of your competitors. A drop or raise in PA or DA relative to the old OSE is of little concern if your competitors saw similar movement. Reporting that your site has moved from a DA of 45 to a DA of 42 doesn’t tell the whole story, but reporting that your site has a DA of 42 while your main competitor moved from a 43 to a 37 shows that, relative to the sites you’re competing against in the SERPs, your site has significantly more authority and ranking power. What’s happening to MozTrust and MozRank and why, and what should I replace those with? The improvements to our DA/PA and Spam Score metrics now now account for more important nuances in helping you determine one site’s ability to rank higher than another. Because they no longer correlate with Google’s ranking model as well as they used to, MozRank and MozTrust are being deprecated for better metrics. Users should rely on Page Authority, Domain Authority, and Spam Score to determine the importance and quality of pages, domains, and links. I have historical data I use to help my clients benchmark their progress. What do I do now that DA is calculated differently? You should annotate any KPI changes referencing the change in DA and PA. However, most importantly, you should compare those changes to your competitors, as this will best show how strong your site’s authority is relative to the sites you’re competing against in the SERPs. We take updating our metrics very seriously, and our last major update to the model was 7 years ago. Users of Domain Authority and Page Authority can expect us to continue to produce steady, reliable metrics for the long haul, and only make changes to these metrics when we believe the benefits dramatically outweigh the stability of the metric. Do you have any questions about the new metrics? Anticipating a tough time reporting changes to clients or bosses? Metrics, features or functionality missing that you would want to see? Let us know in the thread, and we’ll work to find a good answer for you. Hope you enjoy the new Link Explorer product and the amazing new link index powering it. We are very excited to provide this valuable data to our community and customers.
Link Explorer | | IanWatson9 -
I'm doing a link audit and I want to download a spreadsheet of all the links to my website in OSE. There has to be a way to do that right?!
I'm doing a link audit and I want to download a spreadsheet of all the links to my website in OSE. There has to be a way to do that right?!
Link Explorer | | jennie.evans0 -
Backlinks not showing on Open Site Explorer's Just-Discovered Links
Hi guys! My name is Edgar. I've recently been adding a bunch of backlinks to the site i work for, and most of them have a very high DA (DA > 80. Wohoo!). Nevertheless i'm often feel a bit frustrated when i check my site with the OSE, because just a few part of these links are showed in the just-discovered section, although i created them few days ago. So, i would like to know why is this happening, how long it take for my links to get crawled, and when can i stop getting frustrated on this? Than you very much! Edgar.
Link Explorer | | PCBU0 -
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 -
Thousands of Missing Links in OSE Report
Hi there, Moz reports 70k+ external links pointing to my site but when I use the Open Site Explorer to export all links, I only see 9,000+ I have tried combining different combinations of fields ('this root domain', 'this subdomain', 'all links' etc) but can never see more than 9,000 links. My website does redirect to www. and have a couple of subdomains, the report for non www. only shows around 120 external links. We also use Ahrefs and the crawl reports here display 40k+ links (on the dashboard and when exported) which makes me believe the problem is not with my website but rather OSE. Any help is much appreciated, Thanks, Jason
Link Explorer | | Xtend-Life0 -
Learn how to use Moz's Link Intersect tool to build your link profile. Get your Daily SEO Fix!
The quantity and (more importantly) quality of backlinks to your website make up your link profile; one of the most important elements in SEO and an incredibly important factor in search engine rankings. In today's Daily SEO Fix, How to Use Link Intersect to Build Your Link Profile, Tori shows you how to use Moz's Link Intersect tool to analyze the competitions' backlinks plus, find opportunities to build links and strengthen your own link profile. This video is one of our last videos in The Moz Daily SEO Fix tutorial series--Moz tool tips and tricks in under 2 minutes. To watch all of our videos so far, make sure to visit the Daily SEO Fix channel on YouTube. And, if you have suggestions for future tutorials, please let us know via the comments below. Thanks!
Link Explorer | | kellyjcoop2 -
OSE Inbound Link Report Exports Returning Blank
We're trying to download a larger OSE report of inbound links and the report only has headers and no actual data. I'm logged in, so is there a bug here?
Link Explorer | | Highland0
