Is DA a reliable domain metric?
-
I use DA and PA every day for reporting, researching and most of the time it's a pretty good metric to compare domains and pages but recently I did an experiment and I was surprised when I saw the results.
Two months ago I "link bombed" one of my old, unused websites with thousands of spammy blog comment links. Before the attack, its DA was 21 with a few hundred links.
In August, after the recent OSE update I checked the website again and I was quite surprised to see DA 61 as a results of 8340 links.
A DA value over 60 is considered pretty strong and it's interesting to see that spammy blog comment links could change it so significantly. Someone who doesn't know the history of the domain might get interested in advertising on such websites because the mozbar shows a high DA value.
I know it's difficult to algorithmically differentiate between spammy and valuable blogs but a future OSE update could focus on this issue.
Let me know what you think.
-
Do you guys know the Bad Neighborhood tool? It's a pretty simple tool and I use it to quickly check websites for links, dodgy anchor texts and anything suspicious. I would implement a similar method in the DA calculation.
-
The validity of PA and DA is something which must be of great interest to us all. I have recently looked at a spammy page with PR3 but PA of 72? Another aspect of Link Quality is relevancy, which cant be incorporated in to a metric, as relevancy only exists when the backlink has been built.. That would be interesting if a tool could look at a back link and incorporate relevancy in to an Authority metric. All in all PA/DA has been very useful and I look forward to future refinements.
-
Thanks for explaining Gyorgy.
I agree with you there is definitely room for improvement. I know the present focus is the Linkscape tool. If you have any specific suggestions for improving DA, then you may want to submit them to the help desk so they can be considered. The help desk staff does not regularly read the Q&A.
-
I'm afraid you misunderstood my post.
I know that it's only a link metric but since DA and PA is becoming a standard in the SEO world, future updates should consider more variables in the calculation, because online advertising professionals often use and refer to the mozbar for site comparisons.
"DA is mainly a measure of link counts based on the linking page's DA/PA"
Probably it's more than that. The [DA specification page]( It uses a machine learning model to predicatively find an algorithm that best correlates with rankings across thousands of search results that we predict against.) talks about machine learning and that's exactly where this spammy site analysis could improve the calculation. Algorithmically it should be too complicated to filter spammy sites and lower the value of links coming from those pages.
This post is just a tip for SEOMoz' further improvements, because I do like the team and their tools. A software can be improved by continuos testing and by talking about the weaker parts.
-
DA is a very useful metric, but the tool's limitations must be understood. There are several:
The main thing to recognize when using DA is it's based upon the Linkscape crawl of the web. SEOmoz is working to improve the tool, but there are growing pains. For example take a look at: http://www.micrositez-seo.co.uk/
If I recall correctly, that site had a DA of 8x. Due to issues with the last crawl, the site's records were not captured correctly and it presently shows a DA of 1. Any issue with Linkscape will cause an issue with DA.
Also understand Google crawls every site, but Linkscape only crawls the top 25% of web pages. Google will almost always show more links then reflected in your DA.
Another important note, DA is mainly a measure of link counts based on the linking page's DA/PA. As you pointed out, Google will discount spammy links and eliminate their value. Linkscape has no way of knowing what links Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc have discounted, nor what sites have been penalized. The DA will continue to show link value.
The outcome of your test was predicable. If you add 100 links from JC Penney at the time when the site was under a penalty, the DA would have improved for the site receiving the links. The DA does not use "spamminess" or penalties as ranking factors.
In summary, yes DA is a very valuable tool in analyzing websites. Like most tools, it is important to thoroughly understand how the calculations are performed without the tool, then how the tool itself works. Using DA in combination with that knowledge and experience can make your job a lot easier. If you try to base your SEO decisions blindly on DA without the required understanding, you wont be happy with the results.
-
In the meantime my colleague asked me how I would differentiate between spammy and valuable blogs.
My answer was:
These blogs are easily identified as spammy because there's a dodgy 200 word content and hundreds of comments. Every nick name is a link with "smart" anchor texts. The comments are only a few words long and these pages have roughly 4-500 links. ...so it's pretty easy to algorithmically identify these websites as link farm.
I used a black hat link scraper that uses a list of free-to-comment spammy blogs.
Combine the site analysis with this list and you have a nice negative list of domains.
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
-
Domain Authority dropping for me and rival companies
Hey, I have noticed in the past week/2 weeks that my websites domain authority has dropped by 2 points but what is weird is all the other website which are our main competitors in our industry have also dropped by 2. I was wondering if anyone knows of any changes that have been made to the way the domain authority is calculated or is it just a coincident that we all dropped at one time?
Moz Pro | | Bondara0 -
Domain Authority Drop 4 Points
Hi, Our DA has dropped 4 points overnight, looking at our competitors they all seem to have dropped though none as significantly as us? Has anyone else noticed a DA drop? Kind regards,
Moz Pro | | Jaiveer892 -
Following moz guideliness complety, will it certainly improve keyword rankings, domain authority
Hi! G’day to you. I am Naresh from Dotline Infotech. I’d like to take up couple of concerns to be clarified for my better understanding on Moz tool. Indeed, Moz is a nice SEO tool that helps in improving Search engine optimization comprehensive process. We are moz pro member since a year. Moz has equally bifurcated every SEO activity and rate it according to its own benchmark. I intend to ask a series of concerns; Q1. Moz has page grading system A to F. According to Moz guidelines, if the keywords on the page gets repeated minimum 4 times, Moz consider it as ‘A’ grading (one of Moz metric to evaluating the page). Whereas, Google indicates repetition of same keywords time and again is treated as keyword stuffing. According to me, if keywords are already within the content one or two time and furnishing relevant information, why keywords re-occurrence to be 4 time. Does the repetition of same keywords 4 times will lead to give more valuable information? Just a request to let me share why we should unnecessarily repeat keywords? Q2. As per Google guidelines, only 3 keywords can be placed in title tag and also advisable to use only one h1 tag instead of multiple. Among 3 keywords in title tag, only one main keyword can be used in H1 tag. Moz gives much weight age to that particular keyword placed in H1 tag but rest two keywords does not get any importance. I just like to know if we use three H1 tags within page, will it increase the page grading or not. Q3. Does Moz tool have its own index data or refer to Google’s ones? Q4. Following the Moz guidelines completely, will it be 100% sure all our keyword rankings, page authority, domain authority certainly be improved. Looking forward to hear you soon. Thanks
Moz Pro | | dotlineseo0 -
One Follow Link from each subdomain/domain best for SEO?
Hi there, we have a lot of customers linking to our homepage from a subdomain of our domain or from an external domain. From SEO point of view is it best that they all only have one DoFollow Link and the rest of the links are NoFollow? Or does this have no matter at all? The problem is that we have like 900.000 links but only from round about 1000 different root domains. If we put like half of the links on NoFollow our ratio of links/ different root domains gets better. Thanks for answering! Sebastian
Moz Pro | | Sebastian230 -
How to track all domain keywords?
Hello, lets say I have domain www.example.com I want to track rankings of www.example.com/product and www.example.com/anotherproduct with different keywords, so do I have to set up 2 different campaigns? Or is it possilble to track whole root domain with paths? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Rokas0 -
Solution to "Exact Match Domain" issue?
My website bayjobs.com has done well for years, then virtually disappeared from google on September 28, which is the day of the emd (exact match domain) penalty. Meanwhile, similar sites like bajobs.com and bayareajobfinder.com have fared just fine for keywords "bay area jobs". I was previously around #5 for those keywords, but now not even in top 200. Does anyone have any solution for this? Thanks for any insight!
Moz Pro | | UhOh0 -
Domains and sub domains - newbie
Hi Recently set up my SEOM MOZ account so any help would be great! On the competitive domain analysis page the sub domain metrics appear as good (if not better) then the domain.The Moz rank and trust are better on the sub domain. I know the website copy is appearing on both non-www and also www (which I assume is being referred to as the subdomain) on the competitor domain analysis page). Should I now 301 the WWW site to the non-www.... which will then concentrate the SEO and SEOMoz then will only have the root domain metrics appearing? Many thanks for your help in advance!
Moz Pro | | Richard5550 -
Competitive Domain Analysis Update
The updates to the Competitive Domain Analysis were occuring every 7 days upto Jan 16. When will the next updates be and how often is the new schedule? R/ John
Moz Pro | | TheNorthernOffice790