Why would a site w/lower metrics across the board have the highest DA?
-
We are competing with other national brands and have a competitor who is NOT a national brand and who does NOT have any metrics ranking higher. With the latest SEOMoz metric update this week, they (hawaiianjewelryshop) now have the highest DA in Link Analysis. Has anyone else experienced this? Can SEOMoz explain this for us, please? It would be great if Matt Peters would respond to this question.
The sites in question are:
www.nahoku.com
www.mauidivers.com
www.hawaiianjewelryshop.com
www.jared.com -
Hi JP Moulin,
Thanks for your question. Rand and The Back Burner already did a good job explaining some things about PA/DA so I'll stick to looking at the numbers.
I looked at the top level metrics for these four sites in Open Site Explorer:
Site PA DA # Linking Root domains # Links
www.nahoku.com 51 41 196 3695
www.mauidivers.com 53 43 228 4274
www.jared.com 59 51 283 871
www.hawaiianjewelryshop.com 60 52 325 5890
These look pretty well ordered based on these numbers to me (more links + linking domains => higher PA/DA) with the possible exception of www.jared.com which is a bit of an outlier with 283 linking root domains and only 871 links. In this case, the domain links are boosting it's PA/DA. The new model prefers metrics associated with link diversity/domain signals (linking root domains, linking C-blocks, etc) over the old one and this is what's happening with www.jared.com.
-
Well, first, DA is only a small part of SEOMoz campaigns. Personally I use the competitive analysis to monitor the links my competition are getting, the ranking report to track SERP performance, and the Error report to track and fix on-site issues. Those are the areas where the monthly fee really pays for itself, in my opinion.
And again, if you're beating your competition in rankings, then I would worry less about their DA and more about converting all that extra traffic you get into sales.
-
Some good things to know about DA: - It's using an algorithm that examines PA across a domain - It's not a perfect metric by any means (though it is, on average, the best correlated domain-wide metric for estimating a site's performance in Google's SERPs) - The range of correlations is in the 0.15-0.25 area depending on the index update and on Google's changes, so we're still talking about something that only explains a small portion of why a site may rank (page-level factors, anchor text, user/usage data, social data, personalization, goegraphy, etc. are not taken into account) - When a site's DA is higher, but other metrics are lower, it probably has something to do with the link distribution across the site and/or the types of links pointing at the site. That said, definitely will ask Matt to jump in here and have a look. In terms of your request for a $100/month service having better accuracy - as I noted, DA is the best metric we've seen (or any webmaster/SEO I know has seen/measured). It's incredibly hard to build a link index, very hard to calculate a link graph, and then super tough to build a ranking model against thousands of Google's results. I agree that we should be better and we're always working toward that (see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/introducing-seomoz-updated-page-authority-and-domain-authority); this is just an insanely hard problem, due to the massive technology and algorithmic requirements involved in understanding and mathematically quantifying how Google ranks pages.
-
Thanks The Back Burner. The site does not rank higher than us for the targeted keyword, but their DA blows us out of the water. I think (very roughly) is a fair assessment, but how can you use the SEOMoz report (if it's so off) to come up with a strategic plan? I would expect this sort of variance from a free service, but not one that is $100/mo. I look forward to Matt Peter's response.
-
Does this site rank higher than you for your targeted keywords?
I checked out www.nahoku.com and if "hawaiian slipper" is one of your keywords (it's in your page title) then there's no reason to worry - you rank #2 and hawaiianjewelryshop.com doesn't even show up in the top ten.
Building higher DA is good, but as long as you are ranking well for the keyword terms you want to target then you're doing well.
Remember that DA is for reference only - it is most useful as a high-level way to quickly gauge (very roughly) where a site stands.
In the end the only thing that matters for your site is whether you are ranking highly for the terms you want to target and converting the traffic you get from those keywords into sales.
-
Thanks gmkrish for that resource. I would love to hear from the engineers. I love the summary screens but they don't seem insightful at all. Would the better way be to go through OSE, export to spreadsheet, and sort by different metrics for each competitor? Seems like a lot of work for this kind of insight.
-
I too love to hear from SEOMOZ team. In the meantime you may read the answer from Randy for a question related to Domain authority.
http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/32040/what-are-the-component-metrics-of-domain-authority
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
-
How i can increase my site Moz DA and keyword difficulty difficulty?
Is there any way to increase my site Authority through increasing DA of my site and Keyword difficulty ? my site is about gamming like https://cpsandtypingtest.com/
Moz Pro | | sathoiue80 -
Link check via open site explorer not working?
Not sure why this is happening but when i run our site though open site explorer it is only coming back with 1 link yet we have at least 10 - 20? our site is https://www.fastlabels.co.uk and i tried without the https:// so www.fastlabels.co.uk Any help would be appreciated.
Moz Pro | | BobAnderson0 -
Problems with Crawl Diagnostics/New Campaign
Hi all I added a new domain to my campaigns yesterday and got the usual message saying we will have a small set of results ready in a couple of hours, and the rest will be done in a week or so. 24 hours later, this same message is still showing. Anyone else experiencing this or is it just related to my domain? Many thanks. Carl
Moz Pro | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Open Site Explorer WAY Off in Terms of Link Profiles?
Hey, One of our websites is www.inspireeducation.net.au. I have noticed although tools like Raventools capture our links well, Open Site Explorer is doing a terrible job... For example the following page >>> http://www.inspireeducation.net.au/courses/training-and-assessment-courses/certificate-iv-in-training-and-assessment/ has many many more than 8 root domains linking, however Open Site Explorer only presents 8? We are finding the same problem for almost any page we review through Open Site. Does anyone have any idea why the numbers would be so out? The new links are NOT fresh links. Many are well-established (been there for years), and even many newer ones have been there for more that 60 days. I find the same thing when reviewing competitor sites.. is Open Site Explorer working properly at all at the moment?
Moz Pro | | love-seo-goodness0 -
I have corrected the Problems in Crawl Diagnostics. When would it refresh/ re-crawl my site ?
I have corrected most of the problems shown in crawl diagnostics and changed the meta desc. , titles etc. When will SEOMOZ recrawl those pages and show that Its correct now ?
Moz Pro | | VarunBansal0 -
HTTPS In Open Site Explorer
Hey All I was hoping a friendly mozzer might help me out, heard they're hard to track down though 🙂 I see OSE automatically has the http:// for the URL you enter. Anyway to tell if an https:// version of a page has backlinks coming into it with OSE? Thanks! -Dan
Moz Pro | | evolvingSEO0 -
What kind of keyword difficulty should I be aiming for when launching an new site?
I know that words in their 20's or 30's would be ideal, but it's proving hard for me to find relevant keywords with such scores (just a couple with scores in the 30's). Is going for words between 40-50 a waste of time? Thanks.
Moz Pro | | ZakGottlieb711 -
HTTPS site in Open Site Explorer
I'm looking at a site for which the https URL currently ranks in Google. Using a header checker on the http URL I see that it is being 302 redirected to the https version (I have no control or input on this site). In OSE there's no option to specify an https URL as the http part is pre-populated and uneditable. My question is: does OSE treat the https and http version as the same URL? I'm guessing so as the http URL has a lot of domain authority despite not being the "default" URL.
Moz Pro | | Equatorites0