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
-
Witch domain to use the highest authority and backlinks or the new one?
Hello I have 2 domain names to the same website as described: domain.net is redirecting to domain.com 301. domain.net age = 16 years domain.com age = 18 years domain.net was in use before the 301 redirects for many years, and it have a better moz authourity(55) from domain.com(45). also have a better count of linking domains(3.2K backlinks) backlinks from domain.com(1.2K backlinks). all data is from Moz pro. the question was what to use for my website for more SERP traffic? Is using .net domain better? or make them both work without 301 redirect with a canonical meta tag? if yes to witch domain best to point this meta? Thanks
Moz Pro | | alarab.net0 -
New URL, new physical address, New Name. 30 point drop in Domain Authority. Yikes.
I have a client who is asking for SEO help after renaming their business, getting a new URL, and somehow having an address change (without moving to a new location...weird...I know). This has set them back big time in terms of their domain authority (they went from a 46 to a 15 in DA). The web developers they work with put a 302 redirect in place from their old URL (home page), which had 10,477 links from 52 root domains, to their new URL's home page. Open site explorer shows that they now have 5 links! We can improve some of the local search set backs from the name and address change with a citation audit and clean up, but the domain name change is a killer. So here's my question or questions, really: Do we need to manually rebuild links with partner websites? I know there is debate around the actual link juice passed along from a 302 vs a 301 redirect (despite what has been publicly stated by Google). Or is this just a waiting game while old links get recrawled?
Moz Pro | | TheKatzMeow1 -
Other service domain or suddomain or subfolder for domain
Hello page is web design services, wordpress.
Moz Pro | | mferro1984
I want to put in a subfolder computer services.
Influence negatively on SEO that I want to do?0 -
Is www.domain.com/page the same url as www.domain.com/page/ for Google? (extra slash at end of url)
Dear all, in open site explorer there is a difference the url's 'www.domain.com/page' and 'www.domain.com/page/' (extra slash at end). There can be different values in pageauthority etc. in the open site explorer tool, but is this also the case for Google? Thanks for replying, Regards, Ben
Moz Pro | | HMK-NL0 -
Duplicate Content Issue because of root domain and index.html
SEOMoz crawl diagnostics is suggesting that my root domain and the rootdomain/index.html are duplicate content. What can be done to ensure that both are considered as a single age only?
Moz Pro | | h1seo1 -
One of my sites got hit with the exact match domain algo change in google.
one of my sites got hit with the exact match domain algo change in google. I was wondering if it would be trouble or beneficial to add about 10 directory links in the the highest page rank directories in the seomoz directory list. It looks like i only have about 17 root domains linking to my site so far that are natural links and not directory links. i have no directory links as of yet. Will this help or does it spell trouble getting this many directory links in a few months? Thanks mozzers! Ron
Moz Pro | | Ron100 -
Why does SEOmoz assign such a high Domain Authority to subdomains on blogspot, typepad, wordpress.com, etc.?
I thought it was generally accepted that the search engines treat joesmith.wordpress.com and www.wordpress.com as completely different domains. In which case, a cute but obscure blog like http://monkeysalwayslook.typepad.com/ has no business having a DA of 95.
Moz Pro | | CMC-SD0 -
Site metric tool
Is there a tool on here (or anywhere else) where you can upload a list of sites (say 500 sites) and be given things like mozrank on it?
Moz Pro | | thefresh0