Hi Greg,
My name is Lisa and I'm a member of the support team here at Moz.
I want to thank you for getting in touch here and on Twitter to tell us about your concerns and the impact that these failures have on you as a customer and on your clients.
You're right - the last few updates have sucked. They've not been up to the standard that we hope to provide as a company and they haven't been what we want for you or your clients.
And you're right again when you say that our apologies and "we're working on it" messages haven't been enough to give you confidence that we really are doing the best we can to be better.
I apologise for the issue that you've had with your reports and their incomplete data and I wish I could make you some assurances but no decisions have currently been made and I don't want to make you any false promises.
Behind the scenes, the engineering teams have been doing a lot of work to build a better and more reliable crawler, shore up the infrastructure used to store and return the index data and proactively work to spot problems and prevent them from reaching our customers.
Some of this work has caused problems of its own - changing the infrastructure, for instance, made the index fail to upload correctly several times at the end of February - and some of it has not yet been completed.
You mentioned that we 'fudged the index update back in January' and to some extent that is true. We collected a lot of data from sites that were junk and had no value. Since then, we've been reviewing which sites are included in the index and working to strike a balance so that valuable sites are crawled but spam sites and subdomains are blocked. A lot of this work must be done manually.
Another problem we have, with Domain Authority in particular, is that we know there's a mismatch between how it works and how our customers apply it.
Although it is a score between 0 and 100, Domain Authority is a relative metric. It depends on the ranking model data we have (about which types of sites are likely to rank) and the data we've collected in the index, not just for one site but for all of them. A change to the link data we've collected for your site, or for other sites, or a change to the ranking model can dramatically affect the Domain Authority score of any site. This data should not be considered in a vacuum but used comparatively.
Domain Authority scores have always been and will always be expected to fluctuate. The best way to use a site's Domain Authority is to compare it to competitor sites and measure the distance between them. Using it as a standard score out of 100 is likely to cause anger and frustration when it drops, even though drops and rises are both part of the nature of Domain Authority.
Everyone here is invested in making the index better and we all want to make you and your clients happy. We'd like to provide round the clock coverage to solve these problems but this is not possible for us. We have a small engineering team based in Seattle and we use their time as efficiently as possible to allow them to do their best work.
We do feel that our tools have value beyond the link index and Domain Authority data - that's why we offer this for free using MozBar, Open Site Explorer and our API - but I would understand if you feel that the tools are not meeting your needs while there are problems and delays with this data. I'd be happy to help you cancel your subscription and offer a refund on your last payment if this in the case - just reach out to me via help@moz.com.
