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
-
Does a subdomain hurt/help a domain?
My organization's website currently hosts research databases on a subdomain. We're relatively new to MOZ and when I ran a crawl of my site, it came back with 30K issues.... 98% of which are on this subdomain. I wish I could just remove it and call it a day, however, real and active researchers use it regularly. My question is: Does a subdomain hurt/help a domain? I'm seeing mixed results via Google search and browsing this forum. I'm concerned that I will not be able to fix these 30K issues as I do have access to maintain this database... and just by looking at it you can tell it was built in 2005 and hasn't been updated from an SEO perspective since. Any suggestions?
Moz Pro | | mlothamer0 -
Domain Audit
Hi What is the best tool out there to doing a full brand audit for company. They've created at least 15 websites and have possibly many domain names which have been ordered by different people over many years. I need to find the quickest and best tool to do this with. Any suggestions would be great.
Moz Pro | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Better link metrics, but lower rank??
Hello to all, new member here from Houston. I'm learning a lot! I've brought my site up some but my chief competitor is still at #1 position. I ran a full SERP report for my top keyword. My site appears to rank better on: Page Authority…Domain Authority…MozRank…MozTrust...DmT/DmR… Additionally, his on-page grade is F, mine is B! So, it appears sheer bulk incoming links are really where it's at. He beats me, somewhat, at URL Link Counts, also on Followed External Links. The real difference appears to be External Links to This Domain: I have 65, he has somehow managed to get 3500…I think his webmaster has a local directory where everybody links to each other…I can't imagine how a small biz like this, in a fairly non-competitive industry, could get that many. Anyway, thought I'd bring this up for comments/clarifications, if anyone has any---Also, is there a resource to understand these various parameters. Thanks--- John in Houston
Moz Pro | | vondoba0 -
DA drop
Hi guys, Did someone notice a DA drop these days? My website just drop 1 DA point. Regards, G
Moz Pro | | megasource0 -
What web page and domain analysis / error checking / testing tools do you use for competitor analysis? sites like webpagetest
Just wondering what everyone is using, I am looking to get as much insight and detail as I can on websites that are not currently being monitored by me... i.e. potential clients. I use tools like pagespeed, webpagetest, loadimpact and open site explorer, google adwords, ispionage, alexa, semrush and well, looking for more. I really just want to rip a website to the tiniest pieces possible in an organized and coherent manner... is there anything out there? I have tried several other's which i no longer use (compete, 4q, woopra, nuestar, to name a few), I am not sure if I know exactly what i want, i just want more.... damn the human condition. lol
Moz Pro | | atb9900 -
How do we change our domain settings for a changed domain?
We have changed the primary domain for an existing campaign we are tracking with SEOMOZ. How do we update the NEW domain name for our campaign so that we can maintain the existing set of data? We just want to change the URL that SEOMOZ is crawling. We have already updated the Google Analytics settings, so they should be consistent with SEOMOZ once we get the URL updated with you.
Moz Pro | | 403SEO0 -
About the rankings report in the Pro Dashboard, does it track the ranking of every page on a root domain, or just the home page or whichever page you set up the campaign with?
I noticed that one of the pages on my root domain has a #5 rank for a keyword, yet the ranking report says that there are no results in the top 50. So I am assuming it is only tracking the home page. That is one thing I liked about the Rank Tracker, that it would find any page that was ranking on a root domain. Thanks, Lara
Moz Pro | | larahill0 -
TLD vs Sub Domain in Regards to Domain Authority
I have always been under the impression that top level (or root) domains can hold different domain authority than that of a sub domain. Meaning that sub domain's and TLD can hold different ranks and strength in search engine result pages. Is this a correct or just an assumption? If so when i add a root domain and subdomain into the campaign manager i get back the same link information and domain authority? www.datalogic.com
Moz Pro | | kchandler
www.automation.datalogic.com Have I made an incorrect assumption or is this an issue with the SEOMoz campaign manager?0