Today I'm happy to announce that we've just updated Linkscape's web index (which also powers Open Site Explorer and the metrics via the mozBar) with fresh link data. You should see some bright shiny links we've found from late July to early August in this index (e.g. our own Beginner's Guide now has lots of interesting link information). We also have some cool updates to the API, new partnerships and more, all covered below.
50% Correlation Boost to Domain Authority (with some Oddities)
You may recall when we produced our correlation research this Spring, we showed that while Page Authority was substantively better than any other metric for an individual page's importance, Domain Authority was much rougher (and only slightly better than homepage toolbar PageRank, i.e. pretty bad). We've been hard at work improving our models, adding data sources and writing code to help and this index is our first to feature an improved correlation between Google's rankings and Domain Authority.
This chart from April, if re-done today, should show ~50% better correlation for Domain Authority to Google rankings (sorry I didn't have time to make an updated chart)
_
You can see more in this video on How We Calculate Page & Domain Authority.
Unfortunately, along with this update are some strange outliers, likely stemming from us not doing as good a job testing as we should. We've heard feedback from our members that the new scores, in many cases, don't make sense and seem unintuititive. We agree and we scrambled all day today (Friday) to put forward a solution. That should manifest in the next 14-20 days as DA numbers update again (separate from an index update). I'll have more on that in a separate blog post when it launches.
In the meantime, our apologies to those whose numbers are adversely affected. Things should be considerably better in a few weeks, so if reporting or KPIs have you worried, please message to anyone receiving those data points that this temporary glitch should be solved soon and DA will much better relate to a domain's top Page Authority URLs.
New Partnerships
Many of you may have already seen the news that Linkscape data (via our API) is now integrated in Brightedge's enterprise platform. Their software offers an impressive collection of analysis and recommendations, and they've shared a few screenshots with us:
Like our beta web app, Brightedge's software manages a lot of critical SEO data all in one place (but for much larger sites and organizations - customers include MySpace, VMware, and Symantec).
They also do some really spiffy stuff with layering meta data onto links (like "blog, wiki, directory, etc." as descriptors of the type of links you're getting). This isn't yet in the Linkscape API (probably 6+ months away) - Brightedge is analyzing the sites and adding this data themselves!
You can learn more about the integration from Laurie Sullivan on Mediapost (the only inaccuracy I saw was SEOmoz offering "consulting services" - something we haven't done since 2009) or by contacting Brightedge directly.
We're also psyched about integrations with several other tools and data providers including:
- Flippa - the web's leading site for buying and selling web properties now integrates Linkscape metrics in their due diligence section
- Link Research Tools by Christoph Cemper
- Raven Tools - an impressive suite of tools for managing SEO processes that now employs Linkscape metrics in their link analysis section
We've previously integrated with other tools and platforms from folks like Hubspot, Conductor, Authority Labs and many more. If you're interested in the API, you can get a free key to use it (up to 1mil calls/month) here and see lots of code examples on our API wiki.
Improvements to Anchor Text
If you ran previous link reports or have used our API, you likely had the same frustration as infamous SEO rockstar, Greg Boser (of 3DogMedia) as illustrated below:
We've gone ahead and made this change, so that anchor text from Linkscape's API and the tools it powers (Open Site Explorer, et al) are now capitalization agnostic. This means words that appeared in differently capitalized ways in link anchor text will be consolidated to a single version. For example, we may have previously shown different quantities of links for the anchor text:
- SEO
- Seo
- seo
Following tonight's update, these will all be treated as "seo" and consolidated. This should make Greg and a lot of other SEOs, considerably happier. :-)
Index Stats
This month, as always, we've got a new index with freshly crawled pages and links. Stats are as follows:
- 41,362,566,619 (41 Billion) Pages
- 366,305,174 (366 Million) Subdomains
- 96,445,118 (96 Million) Root Domains
- 409,355,797,533 (409 Billion) Links
Some other interesting numbers this month include:
- 5.1% of URLs contain rel=canonical - the highest yet!
- 3.1% of URLs contain a meta noindex directive
- 2.06% of all links are rel=nofollow
- 57% of rel=nofollow links are internal (pointing to pages on the same domain)
- 43% of rel=nofollow links are external (pointing to pages on different domains)
- 84.9% of all links are internal (linking to pages on the same root domain)
- 87.5% of all links point to pages on shared c-block of IP addresses
Look for even more exciting things from Linkscape over the next few months, with some really big, exciting improvements to freshness and coverage by year's end.
And, as always, feel free to give us any feedback you've got!
p.s. We're taking a hard look at the feedback re: Domain Authority numbers, and have some action items ahead. Some relevant things to be aware of include:
- We believe our testing for this index wasn't robust enough -we've now seen a lot of cases of DA 1 and DA 100 that clearly aren't logical moves.
- While, on "average" DA is now better correlated with rankings, it makes far less intuitive sense. We think we may have optimized toward the wrong goal.
- We're taking this very seriously, and may actually try to roll out an update to the DA metric in the next 2 weeks (prior to the next Linkscape update)
- As soon as I have clarity and a call is made, I'll be posting another blog entry on what went wrong and details of the fix.
My sincere apologies to all who are adversely affected. Feel free to ignore DA scores for now if they don't make sense for you and anticipate we'll be shooting for a fix ASAP. Thanks for sharing this information with us.
p.s. Update #2 - I've added more details in the section on Domain Authority. New scores will be out in the next 14-20 days prior to the next index update. Thanks to everyone for their vociferous and passionate feedback. We're working hard to make this better.
p.s.s Update #3 - The new DA numbers were updated on 9/2. Please let us know via [email protected] if you encounter any oddities! Thanks for your patience!
Hi gang - a few things:
1st) Our testing for this index wasn't robust enough -we've now seen a lot of cases of DA 1 and DA 100 that clearly aren't logical moves.
2nd) While, on "average" DA is now better correlated with rankings, it makes far less intuitive sense. We think we may have optimized toward the wrong goal.
3rd) We're taking this very seriously, and may actually try to roll out an update to the DA metric in the next 2 weeks (prior to the next Linkscape update)
4th) As soon as I have clarity and a call is made, I'll be posting another blog entry on what went wrong and details of the fix.
My sincere apologies to all who are adversely affected. Feel free to ignore DA scores for now if they don't make sense for you and anticipate we'll be shooting for a fix ASAP. Thanks for all the feedback.
Sorry I read this later after adding comment.
Thanks for that positive approach over the feedbacks.
Big drop in the DA of one site, however my personal site (which is pretty poor) is now at 100... "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"
Hah, seeing something similar. One site with natural search visits in the 100's (on a good day...) is more than twice the DA than a site with natural search visits in many 10's of 1000's daily, on a bad day!
SEO: "hey boss, we spent $xxx,xxx on SEO and increased our DomainAuthority / PageRank / PixieDust by +1!"
BOSS/Client: "what impact did that have on sales?"
SEO: "none"
I thought SEO was about improving leads, sales, conversions, etc? Why are we pissed off about a drop in a magic number?
PA and DA are supposed to help us shape SEO strategies. Weaknesses in our site, weaknesses in others, etc. But at this point they really don't mean anything to me. My boss isn't going to care that our DA went down. But I echo the disappointment of others on here that there seems to be little rhyme or reason for the DA and PA shifts. It's not like "40 is the new 60." There's no scale. Did I get attacked by spam? Not that I can see. I would like to see a better explanation of how the PA and DA were adjusted.
Did you check it against your competitors as Rand suggested? Everything seems fairly in line to me regardless of what the number is when compared to other sites in same industry. I haven't seen any cases yet where I expected to be head and shoulders above my competiotrs on something or even below and all of a sudden there was a major shift from where they are and where we are.
And tonystocco, good point. These magic numbers should not be our focus anyway,maybe a helpful guide from time to time, but like pagerankshould not be focused on too much or you will go crazy. Bottom line is that traffic, conversions, sales should rule our thought.
Nope. Not in our case. One of our competitor is 10 points ahead after the update and they were 3 points behind us couple hours before the changes. How can you explain that?
Link comparison shows we have more powerful links and web presence than them. There is no way on earth they can more 10 points because more 10 points ahead is like tons of links. Plus, their opensitex data is same as before.
A page that has 0 links is now PA = 30 and page will 50 links is PA = 25.
I agree it helps shape strategies - and it's awesome for that.
However, there is absolutely no reason to report PR/PA/DA as proof of success.
Hello Tony,
For some of us it not about proving success or bragging rights, but trying to understand how our changes (link building efforts, error fixing, content building, etc) are influencing the search results. If the numbers are meaningless then why have tools that report them?
Seomoz should listen to its customers, some of who are telling them that if your going to fiddle with the DA and PA then we need your tools to give us more reliable "progress" indicators.
-Steven
I totally agree its all about sales at the end that what's count but if the reports are being sent out organization wide by the SEO department then it creates unneeded argument and confusion. Each organization is different and in some organizations sales team is worried about the traffic metrics more than anything because the conversion cycle is much longer.
We are not pissed off about the drop / increase in the number we are pissed off about the concept and if its not concrete then lets get rid of it.
These metrics have now become a core part of the SEO dashboards and agencies are applying it to their web apps through APIs. Changing metrics constantly puts the integrity of the company using these metrics in their app at stake. People will start losing trust in companies like BrightEdge because of the questionable "updates".
I understand the concept of providing better and more accurate information but messing around with key metrics is insane. We use your metrics to track our SEO performance and competitive landscape and we trust me. These unexplained changes totally destroy the purpose of using them for SEO.
All of our senior leadership is now questioning our use of these metrics because at this point they don't mean anything.
Sometimes are competitors have better domain authority and sometimes they are worst.
Totally unacceptable.
Personally I don't think you should be using these metrics to assess you SEO performance. There are much better metrics you can use.
Most of the sites that I manage have dropped in Domain Authority yet most are doing better in terms of rankings, traffic and business.
If you are going to use DA and PA as a metric, you may as well just use Page Rank!!
Hi there - very sorry we've had this impact.
I would agree with seospain - DA, PA, mozRank, PageRank, etc. are all good for doing competitive analysis "in the moment" against other sites and pages, but they're not KPIs like search traffic or # of referring pages/keywords/etc.
I'll try to write more thoroughly about this in the future, and we'll also be working hard to make an update to DA scores in the next 2 weeks.
Rand,
You say: "I would agree with seospain - DA, PA, mozRank, PageRank, etc. are all good for doing competitive analysis "in the moment" against other sites and pages"
This isn't so. Your own data shows there is a very weak correlation between DA and PA, and the way sites rank.
For example, consider this search phrase and the top 10 sites that rank for it: image css
Page Authority and Domain Authority Numbers
76, 42
41, 12
29, 1
54, 45
44, 25
1, 36
57, 20
69, 41
52, 59
55, 46
The two sites with the HIGHEST Domain Authority rank #9 and #10.
The two sites with the HIGHEST Page Authority rank #1 and #8.
The two sites with the LOWEST Page Authority rank #3 and #6.
The two sites with the LOWEST Domain Authority rank #2 and #3.
You should probably remove DA and PA from the SERP overlay because they are not helpful. They have weak correlation.
Greg
Um, the capitalisation thing was something I found valuable. I don't like to go into why, but several rather talented people I work with also used that data, and we will miss it.
I'd suggest rethinking that.
PS: rockstar. Not rockstar.
i agree, there needs to be a quick analysis that consolidates the links and another that allows you to break it out
https://thelostagency.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/google-influenced-by-case/
Sorry about that Jane!
It's unfortunately, a lot of work to make both available, but in the long term, we'll make that part of our goals. If other folks would prefer ONLY to have the capitalized-segmented version, please write to us and let us know ([email protected]). Prior to Jane's request, we hadn't found anyone who preferred it this way (hence the switch).
The different numbers are a bit shocking. However, I'm willing to be patient while this gets worked out. It's apparent Rand is aware of the concern (he's personally responded to many of the comments) and will get the thing tightened up. Rand, it's better to have an accurate tool than a fast fix: please take the time to do the right things to make this work properly.
Andy :-)
Thanks Andy - certainly appreciate the patience. This fix won't be a perfect solution, but it should get us back to numbers that make more sense, and we'll be continuing to improve (and test more heavily) from there.
This is awesome, huge improvement.
However, an anomaly in the way you're calculating domain authority has allowed me to discover a vast network of link spam, probably generated by some sort of worm.
There are a large number of pages linking to me that come from domains which have DA of 100. The homepages for these domains appear normal, but they are infested with auto-generated subpages that link to all of the top results for a wide variety of SERPs. My guess is that this is an attempt to funnel PR and relevance for "pictures" related terms into a pr0n network, but I'm not sure -- whatever they're doing is pretty convoluted.
What made these pages stand out was the domain authority of 100.
To see this for yourself, just do a link analysis for any mid-sized photo site (the really big ones have so many backlinks it's hard to find these particular ones). You can see it on my site, and many related ones for example flowerpictures.net and hickerphoto.com. Restrict by followed+301, external pages only, all pages on root domain, and then sort the results by domain authority. You'll see these pages pretty quickly, they stand out because they have URLs like wmgy.php?afdj= etc.
Two questions about this:
Any ideas on what I should do about it? Not sure how this could be hurting me because it's happening to all of my competitors too, but it just doesn't feel right and besides, it looks like all of these domains have been hacked.
Any idea why these domains have DA of 100? Seems like they're pulling a fast one on your algo.
The annoying thing about this is that it completely wrecks the count of linking domains, because I'm quite sure search engines will discount these links.
Well... Scary and useful at the same time.
You know what - I just found the same thing. My competitors with high DA have backlinks like this: https://www.joboxo.com/ that have a DA of 100. Directories and junk links with a DA of 100. https://www.f8d.net/ also has a DA of 100.
What is happening here?
Update: DO NOT VISIT THESE SITES
Some of them appear to contain malware of the fake-antivirus variety, and I strongly suspect that even the ones that don't appear to contain malware probably do.
I've reported them to Google, both as a spam report and as a malware report. Anything else I should do?
Also, is there any way we can get these sites removed from the SEOmoz index? They're messing up my backlink counts and those of all of my competitors, to the point where I don't think any of the "number of linking domains" information is useful at all.
We regularly try to track sites like this and remove obvious spam from what we crawl/index, but we don't have nearly the spam-fighting sophistication of Google.
That said, we'd certainly love to get a list from you, as we can help to pattern match against seed sets like this to stop abusers from getting into our index. Feel free to use [email protected]
Thanks so much!
Thanks, Rand, I'll do that.
Ok, my Domain Authority now officially sucks, haha, I could squint with one eye and pretend it was like it was before, yeah I'll do that, and bury my head in the sand by deleting the moz toolbar from firefox .... nah, ok, sooooo SEOmoz game on, time to raise my DA!
Oh, FYI I went from 54 to 19 ... 19! or was it 17? I couldn't look any longer to make sure ... in fact I think I almost swallowed my tongue ...
I've seen some tremendous drops of DA on some domains, from 50's and 60's down to a DA of 1, and those are ranking competitive sites.
On my own personal blog (5 root domains link to it) I went from 38 DA down to 1, while my best friend's personal blog (2 root domains) jumped from 1 to a DA 91, and yet the PA of the home is only 17.
PA changes seems more accurate to me with no massive shifts, but right now, I think DA is useless as a metric. Even SEOmoz.com shows as DA 45 with almost 3 million links from over 22k domains. How can SEOmoz.com only be a DA 45?
How can I use a measure tool that keeps changing. This is the second time in less than 6 months SEOmoz has changed the PA DA measurement to get a more accurate reading....you can not keep changing the goal posts!
very concerned, so much so I am concidering stopping my Pro subscription.
May consider that here too. I'm beginning to think these are toys that webmasters believe in whether or not they're accurate. I do enjoy the openness of the blog content however!
That's a fair point - I guess I'd say (as I did to some commenters above) that our metrics, particularly around link evaluation, are intended primarily to perform competitive analysis, rather than as KPIs for historical tracking (this is why we don't have a "historical" metrics methodology at present).
I know that's small comfort and we should be doing a better job, but if you're using something like DA/PA to track your SEO progress, I'd strongly recommend switching to stats like # of keywords sending traffic or # of visits from search (via your analytics). Linkscape's data is great for a "snapshot" in time and a relative measurement, but not for tracking progress from week to week or month to month.
Hmm...I'm a bit concerned that our DA dropped about 20 points and some of our competitors only experienced drops of about 5. Then again, some other competitors experienced just as large drops as we did. The DA #s on the first page changed a lot but the rankings are still consistent...
Did this update bring about changes to the keyword difficulty tool as well? All of a sudden my market became more competitive, damn!
Hey Rand,
Long time visitor of the site, but a new Pro member. Had a question for you regarding opensiteexplorer.com analysis that I did this morning. I ran a report for a client of our, vs one of their competitors & our home page's Page Authority is 57 (compared the their 78), but our Domain Authority is 38 (compared to their 19). Our linking root domains is 315 (compared to their 2,126).
It would seem to me that the competitor should have a much higher Domain Authority. Is it common to have a lower home Page Authority, but a higher Domain Authority? Am I missing something here?
Thanks,
Daniel
Your PA scores have changed MASSIVELY - I have sites that have gone from a PA of 30+ to 1 despite getting a bunch of new very high authority links. I see an explanation above for Domain Authority but not Page Authority.....what has gone down there to produce such huge changes.
The company you highlight "Bright Edge" has a DA of just 11???
Having looked through a few different domain's it seems to me that the Domain Authority is now more in line with Google Pagerank than before.
My domains had DA of 52 and 62 before the update, (62 being a four month old domain), and they have now both been reduced to one. Regardless, we have seen massive improvements in terms of ranking for both domains over the last three weeks.
As for the PA's, well, they seem to have been adjusted positively, regardless of the fact that it does not appear that the sites have been spidered thoroughly. The number of links remains at status quo, despite the fact that we have been link building steadily and both should have at 30-40 more links for each site than the last time we had a visit from your crawlers.
Interesting update, although perhaps slightly disappointing in both terms on found links, and results. However, I do have faith in SEOmoz over the long term. Keep up the good work, boys and girls. ;)
The biggest issue for me is that there is seemingly no consistency in the stats. Without consistency they are pretty much useless as a reporting aide to show progress.
Hello Mr CEO - yes we did have a DA of 65 and yes we invested $1m in SEO and now we have a DA of 40 - but ummm yeah honestly our SEO is better now.
Hi Ben - yeah, I apologize - this is how DA and PA are going to be for a while. As our work on machine learning gets us higher average correlations, numbers are going to continue to flip around quite a abit. This is a big reason why we don't currently have a "historical" PA/DA - they're not particularly useful is absentia from index to index.
My best suggestion is to look across the competitive spectrum at several dozen domains in your space and measure yourself against them. Or, alternatively, if you need a more "historical tracking" metric, use Domain mozRank (which calculates a PageRank-like metric on the domain graph) or # of linking root domains.
I know it's frustrating to have this metric that flops around, but we also think it's important that we're as "honest" and accurate about it as possible - today it's still in infancy, and likely needs many more such updates and improvements before achieving consistency.
Let me know if I can help more in any way.
Thanks Rand, appreciate the view point and understand the challenges on driving some consistency in the approach.
This is why I do not quote DA or PA authority to my clients. They are too inconsistent. Most of my sites have gone from DA of say 40 or 50 to 20 or something like that. Yet the sites are doing better in terms of rankings, traffic and other metrics.
It's all well and good having these metrics but if they are so volatile what's the point?
I've seen huge changes that nearly made me wet my pants.
Is the new database correct???
Well... Correct is a relative term. The new DA numbers are correct according to the modifications to the formula as per the improvements in our machine learning and ranking models. Again, I'd say to compare lots of DA relatively across your competition/industry, rather than against what they were last week/yesterday.
Update: We have noticed (as I've edited in the blog post above) that some very weird outliers exist (particularly at 1 and 100, but even in the mid ranges). Although the average correlation is better, we're going to be issuing an update to the numbers in the next 2 weeks with what we hope is a substantive improvement. Sorry about that!
The data certainly seems to correlate to Google's rankings, but it's just such a huge change.
I need a refresher course on what goes into domain authority so I can work to improve it.
"Well... Correct is a relative term"
That's awesome, I'm going to use that! :P
Some of my websites, and clients websites DA, have dropped from 40-50 to like 1-2 , bit confused why such a drop
It's likely the case that you've done nothing wrong, and it could even be that you're doing better, but the formula should now be more representative on average of expected performance. For example, SEOmoz itself "dropped" from a 66 rto a 45, but most of the sites in our sphere or those that compete are also now in that range, while sites that were likely much more powerful than us (LinkedIn.com for example moved from a 68 to 78) now have those more representative numbers.
DA still isn't perfect - but the correlation with rankings should now be dramatically improved (though still relatively small compared to PA).
On Edit: Note some of my other comments and the changes to the post above - we're going to make some changes to help sort out some of the very odd outliers we've seen reported. Very sorry for the adverse effects.
Gah, i can only hope something is wrong, because all the sites I run have dropped in DA.
Really don't want to read about this on a friday ;'(
Hey guys. Love how you constantly improve.
However, I just noticed that www.domain.com and domain.com report different, even for domains that redirect the non www to the www variant. Is this the expected behaviour? Shouldn't they be merged in the case of the redirection being in place?
OMFG... WTF... ROFL.... and more such acronyms that the hip kids seem to speak in today.
I've just checked one of my domains, and found a DA of 99/100. I guess I can go home now and relax!
Seriously though, I doubt that Ive done that good a job that Im beating wikipedia....
Lol - one of my domains is suddenly showing DA of 100. That's when I knew something was up and ended up here. Still the best link research tool, but hope it gets fixed soon.
Your previous version was better Rand. Domain with current page rank 5 is showing 29/100 Domain authority.
Almost all results I have tested for existing domains of competition are showing wrong data and inverse of Matt Cutts recent video. THEY have gathered more than 50000 new back links in 3 months using all means on internet. Updation of PR by Google will clarify the things in a better way. But I have a doubt about new changes.
So Facebook has a DA of 100 and Google DA 60 , my site has dropped from 48 to 6 - whats going on , can we really accept this analysis as being accurate ??
Yeah - as I noted in the update to the post and my comments above, we've found some significant outliers - so although the average DA is now better, we're going to be making another update to improve in the next 14-20 days.
Sorry about that!
p.s. Not sure where you're getting numbers though - Google.com and Facebook.com both have root domain authorities of 100 (via mozBar, OSE or SERP overlay)
We monitor this data very close using the API and I am becoming less trustworthy of the data. The link profiles we consistently look at seem to be regressing in quality vs. actual. We built a tool that looks at linkscape data vs. actual and every month the percentage differences seem to be increasing. Both crawls are based on the most recent dataset as well..... Looking at the top 1000 links in a profile, we are finding more and more links that no longer exist being thrown in during new updates, when in fact the links may have not existed for a much longer period than during that 30 day run. I will be very interested to learn more about the data set during the conference next week.
If you are going to try and roll out a new set in the next few weeks, I would very much look at the raw data. I think the raw data you are using is WAY off. It almost seems like old data with new data. Or just plain old data, not a recent crawl. We are seeing MASSIVE irregularities...
Jason - please shoot me an email - [email protected]. We'd love to dig deeper and see what you're seeing.
I am amending my comments to "wait it out". A lot of the information I was going to email you about has been discussed in the following comments. After looking at data again, it made more sense to wait it out.
Looking forward to the updated results. I have learned a lot about how we were using the data as well, and will be making some changes in the future, as it appears we were using it in some ways that are not recommended.
Thanks again for the effort here.
New tweaks in the formula seem to be more accurate across the board for DA. Over time, I see the current formula to take things further closer to G.
Gj Rand and team.
I am a big fan of the changes.
I hear a lot of people talking about their DA dropping to 1, but my site dropped from 57 to 29. Is that because of the same problem, or is 29 just a more accurate number for our site?
I am hoping it goes back up, but not the end of the world. We focus on the links and no DA/PA since they vary often.
I got the same problem... my site from DA 57 to DA 22... even though it shouldn't be bothered because we should focus on links but still worries me because the competitor site DA doesn't change, they still in the 50 and above...
So far so good for me. Some of our page's numbers dropped but it does seem like they are more inline with where we rank. Sounds like it just needs a little fine tunning and it should be fine. As far as using DA and PA as metrics I try not to, although it I do take it into account slightly. I focus on the amount of links and how many domains they come from and how relevant they are to the target site. I only really start digging into the link profile if the domain authority is low but the site has tons of links. To me that is an indication of lots low quality links (and usually that's what I find). So keep up the good work guys. I'm also really excited for the web app. I can't wait to see what gets added to it in the future.
My sites domain authority used to be in 50-60 now its in the 20-30... is this mean I'm screwed? Is this temporary effect in the Linkscape or it mean my link profile are terrible? but doesn't make any sense because my new site that has no link also got domain authority 30... zzz so confused...
Well I am just thankful that there are people out there who take the time to make these tools, let you use them for free and then work really hard make them better for you. I don't care if my sites have dropped DA, clearly the data is a lot less useful right now as it seems to be all over the place but regardless it is still a very useful tool to have in the bag when combined with all of the other tools on the net :)
Is it just my feeling but everyone seems to be too focused on DA numbers. Does drop mean less traffic or worse ranking?
At least I can stop panicing now, my own domain has gone from 61 to 1! Looking forward to the fix!
Those DA 1 issues are certainly outliers and erroneous - we'll be working to fix that with the update in a couple weeks.
Hi Rand, far from intending to groan any more about the inconsistencies/inaccuracies on DA metrics, here's looking forward to the update on the DA metric in the next 2 weeks, and subsequently to the Linkscape dbase. Thanks for taking the time to respond to all questions, it's good to see that something is being done. ;)
Amidst all the complaining about DA inaccuracies (Rand said they are working hard on an update asap sheesh) I want to compliment you on how quick you address these issues.
I haven't been to the blog in a few days and I was just going over some site metrics and noticed the DA change (and of course some nice PA improvements)...shot over to SEOmoz and there is already a lengthy post addressing every question/concern I could have.
Keep up the good work guys! Best tools in the industry (in my opinion)
Paypal has a domain authority of 28, and my health blog 52. Something obviously isn't right with DA for that to be correct??
Previous to the update, we used to have homepage authority of 42 and domain authority of 58. Now the two have switched (PA 59, domain 41).
Also, our root domains went down by half, but links went up by some thousand.
I checked from an earlier list and the links not counted are still in place (obviously).
I have no idea what it all means, so I'm going to take it on faith from Rand that it's a work in progress and they're working on it.
Clearly it doesn't make any difference in actual search results, so it's just a tool that's yet to be perfected. I appreciate Rand & Co being up front about it.
If you've got more links from fewer linking root domains, I'd suspect it's because we crawled the sites that were linking to you more deeply but may have shifted away from crawling some of the other domains we previously did. Every index, we are doing some quality analysis and dropping some sites/pages we're pretty sure are not counted by the engines.
It's also possible we've somehow missed crawling those sites, though - if you're pretty sure that's the case, please ping us with the domains you think we should be crawling and we can look into why. You can email me direct or send it to [email protected].
Thanks!
I track all my competitors' PA/DA's, and the relative change among PA/DA's were more accurate on 8 sites, with less accuracy on one. Overall, a solid update.
I would suggest SEOMoz looking into some anomolies I've seen with small sites coming up with a DA of 100, though. I can send example URLs if you'd like.
We've had one client leap from 44 to 75 and another plunge from 58 to 10. Neither make a great deal of sense to me.
The one at 75 isn't so far ahead of its competitors to justify a 20 point difference.
The drop is counter-intuitive to the link work over the last month which has raised ranks significantly.
Sorry to say but this looks like link algorithm update FAIL.
The issue here is frustrating to wrap one's head around, but a loss of DA doesn't mean you're doing worse - just that the scale has changed. These aren't like # of visits, where lower is worse - everything's going to be relative. So, if your competitors are were at 50 and you were at 45 and now you're 20 and they're 15, you've likely improved. It's just that our scales are being re-worked to make a best fit.
That said, we're working on a fix in the next couple weeks for some of the big outliers, so that may shift things back to a more logical position, too.
We are in the same boat so I feel your pain. Some of our DA's fluctuated in both directions on our large domains, and I saw the same fluctuation on some of my client’s sites and test sites I have as well. I think the big picture for both SEO agencies and in-house SEO's that are trying to show the worth of their seo efforts is to educate your client or management team on what the numbers mean and what’s really important. SEO’s can’t lose sight of the fact that the DA and other moz metrics, which are amazing don’t get me wrong, are just one tool in the seo toolbox and should be used as guidance in the much larger puzzle. So to focus on just one metric like DA, one can lose sight of the other key components.
wow - our site saw a 30+ point increase in PA in this update. It seems like a lot of web design firms authority bounces as Google changes the value of footer links... which for a lot of designers/webdevelopers is the main source of link building.
oops looking at the wrong metric. DA went slightly down, but so did a lot of the competition. These footer links are losing more and more value each day.
I looked at Bright Edge. I have to say i briefly thought about transitioning to it but i said HEC NO! because I <3 SEOmoz. I'm sticking with the web app!
Our PA and DA jumped from 30's to 70 DA and 50 PA which reflects much better our current rankings and linking efforts. Previous update dropped us from DA 50 to 30 while our rankings went up from 8-10 to 1-4, so the current update makes more sense.
I think DA is broken personally.
thanks for fixing the capitalization issue with anchor text. I have been waiting for that for a while.
Thank you for changing the anchor capitalization thing. Now, maybe for Jane's sake ou could make it so you could select whether to combine them or not?
And also, thanks for keeping that damn picture alive. wait until this year. Going to get some better ones for you. :)
This seem to be a strange update from DA point of view.. Some of our sites with two backlinks and no search presence got 75 DA while other with several hundred authoritative links and top rankings have droped down to 1 from 50 plus, but the ranking still remains!
Several quality links that were built with lot of effort have been ignored this time. Checking backlinks with yahoo siteexplorer tell a different story !
Incosistent and uncertain , bringing these metrics into clients consideration can blow up things overnight..
Why the page authority metric show different values with domain.com and www.domain.com.
Finallly,
Drop and increase in DA value has no impact on ranking, coz the ranking is still there for all the domains that has seen drop in DA value.
Hey SEOmoz Team - Thank You for making your software better & more accurate! I appreciate your hard work and commitment to improving your tools and softare.
Have a kick-ass day!
Everything looks good from what I've looked at so far. Some sites dropped, some went up. It looks more dramatic than it is sometimes given that its on a 100 point scale. So a drop of 10-15 points if you are at 40 seems pretty harsh but in reality isn't so bad.
But SEOmoz with a DA of 45? I thought it would be more around 60-70 at least. Strange but true..
I find PA / DA to be a good metric to use when I'm looking for link opportunities. But I don't use it as a benchmark for SEO performance reporting. mozRank better measures raw linkbuilding efforts so using it as a benchmark is more useful in my opinion.
Is Yahoo Site Explorer still going to provide backlink info now that Bing seems to have taken over their search results?
I mean, once Yahoo is displaying Bing results internationally, will they bother to spider the web at all, and if they don't, will site explorer shut down?
Does anyone know?
Huge change! Job job guys, I was just thinking last few weeks that in the end the DA was not so accurate, now looks pretty much better!
are you kidding me?
I second that. Are you KIDDING ME !!! ;)
No. Checking few websites I'm working on it looks like the system is working better.
Quite often I saw website with a PA 20 on their Homepage, and a DA of 68, now the PA of the Homepage and the DA are closer that makes sense (my personal point of view).
Fair enough - everyone is entitled to their view point.
here look at a google search for "home loans" without the quotes obviously. And we might all say "are you kidding me?" It seems that in many competitive search terms I have tested the#1 result has the lowest DA...from then on it seems to be accurate. Many of the sites I'm working on were knocked down significantly, while the competitors that I'm beating in SERPS were increased in DA. One site has a DA of mid 30's w/ a PA of high 80's! So maybe now the PA is more closely correlated w/ rankings than DA???
Google Rank Site DA
1 ditech.com 10
2 lendingtree.com 68
3 freddiemac.com 43
4 quickenloans.com 32
Another one: google: satellite tv
1 dishnetwork.com 37
2 directv.com 56
3 videonetwork.org 21
Rand - Let me just say I love your stuff. Also, I am by no means an expert in grammar. However, I thought I would point out to you your misuse of i.e and e.g. - Check out this infographic (which I did not do and was not paid to plug) https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ie Or this more historical reference.
https://ancienthistory.about.com/od/abbreviations/f/ievseg.htm
Either way I hope this helps for your future posts keep them coming.
PS - Loved your White-board Friday today.
Hi there - read the article, and it appears to support the usage I've employed above.
i.e. should be used when one could also write "that is"
The sentence I used was:
Which, I believe, is the proper usage. E.g. would be appropriate when an example is given, but that's not my intent - I'm trying to say "that is - pretty bad."
Let me know if I've misinterpreted the pieces you pointed to. I always like to be careful with grammar :-)
In the immortal words of some guy, " Oh SNAP!"
But you are correct Rand, I checked it out as well.