How much attention should I pay to Moz's DA/PA?

[PeaSoupDigital]

Hola!

I've been optimising a site since October and our hard work has yielded a sizeable increase in organic traffic, revenue, quality, relevant links and Search Metrics scoring since commencing the campaign.

After yesterday's Moz update, the DA has dropped slightly and a number of pages' PAs have dropped significantly (i.e. from 27 to 17). So here are my questions:

• My 'white hat' optimisation is clearly working. The site is enjoying more than 100% year-on-year increase in organic traffic and we're currently pulling in more organic visitors than ever before. Why is Moz's score not reflecting this?
• Some of the pages that have seen sizeable PA drops have had their URLs changed since the last Moz update. For example, I've optimised a URL from www.mysite.com/cases-covers to www.mysite.com/phone-cases to coincide with search volumes. I've added optimised content to this page too, but the PA has dipped from 27 to 17. A 301 redirect has been correctly added, and this is evident by a PA of 17 and not zero, which is what a brand new page would have.
• Am I paying too much attention to Moz's scores? It's a bit disheartening to see a drop after a lot of hard work. However, I guess the only thing that really counts is an increased volume of search traffic and revenue, right?

Cheers,

Lewis

[PeaSoupDigital]

Thanks all for the great responses... as usual!

[RyanPurkey]

In addition to Don and Matt's excellent answers, I'd only add that you're giving the right priority to how you're measuring the performance of your site: increases in sales, increases in organic traffic, relevant links, and referral visits. Ultimately tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic are comparative samplings of the net and not the defacto proxy of Google.  If they're helping you build out your network and find new places where you can connect then you're doing well.

[donford]

Hi Lewis,

Rand just posted about DA/PA with their recent huge crawl update. Here

"..This means that DA and PA scores may fluctuate more than usual, as link diversity are big parts of those calculations and we've crawled a much larger swath of the deep, dark corners of the web (and non-US/non-.com domains, too)..."

Even with that, I really try to pay more attention to what you mentioned, user engagement, click-through, in-bound links, organic traffic and on our retail site; SALES! Google has really been shaking things up, I've seen more often then not lower pa/da pages higher in SERPS then ever before. While I don't have anything to point to prove this is true, we all know Google's goal is to provide the best possible pages for a users search.

Just because a domain / page has been around since Al Gore invented the internet and has a high da/pa doesn't mean it is the most relevant for today's Googlers.

[MattAntonino]

PA & DA are a place to start but the index is so small compared to the net in general that you can't really just say "this is" the score or not. I've seen sites that Moz lists 20-50 backlinks and Majestic links 15,000.  Same with Ahrefs.

I saw a client just today with: 100 Moz, 1500 Ahrefs, 9000 Majestic.  I always assume Majestic may see about 30% of my links. That means a site with 27,000 links, Moz sees 100 sometimes.  How accurate can it be with 1 out of every 270 links?

Also, the opposite can be true. Google may not have picked up on a link or three that Moz did pick up.  Also, Moz can't see disavows so if you get rid of 49 out of 50 links, Moz may give you a higher (or lower) PA/DA than your site deserves.

There's a lot to it - I would use it as a guide but don't judge your SEO efforts by a 5 point PA rise or fall.