Moz has announced a significant update to their Domain Authority metric aimed at enhancing its capability to detect link sellers and other spammers. Traditionally, Domain Authority (DA) has been used to determine link pricing. This update may disrupt paid link traffic but could enhance its value for SEOs, who seek a more accurate quality measure.
### Will Moz DA Devalue Private Blog Networks?
Reducing the value of links from sites selling them is a primary objective for the updated Domain Authority metric. As highlighted by feedback on social media, there are instances where websites sell high-DA links that are actually from spammed domains, misleading buyers. Responding to this, Russ Jones, Principal Search Scientist at Moz, assured that the new DA could devalue link sellers, link buyers, comment spam, and more.
Jones mentioned they specifically targeted link sellers using advanced methods, integrating them into the DA’s neural network to classify these sites lower in ranking. Regarding Private Blog Networks, or PBNs, he explained that blocking Moz’s crawlers could reduce a site’s DA, potentially undermining their link-selling intentions.
### Moz’s Spam Score and Link Spam Detection
Some criticize Moz’s spam score for not catching link spam. However, Jones clarified that the spam score measures on-page factors and is not designed to detect link spam. It estimates the chance of a site being deindexed or penalized based solely on on-site metrics.
### Introducing Improvements to DA
A longstanding concern with Moz Domain Authority has been its bias against high-quality sites that don’t attempt to rank yet are important. DA inherently focuses on factors that support site ranking, overlooking valuable sites that do not engage directly in competitive SEO practices. This update seems to address this bias by improving its understanding of sites with no keyword rankings.
Moz reports that the updated Domain Authority is now better at recognizing the quality of sites that don’t rank for any keywords, thus making DA more reliable for assessing site quality.
### Enhancing Link Analysis with DA
The refined analysis targeting smaller non-ranking sites mirrors the latest in link ranking algorithms. Although Moz remains discreet about the specifics, they announced a transition to neural networks for link analysis to detect link manipulation more effectively.
### Integrating Spam Score into DA
By incorporating the Spam Score into the DA analysis, Moz significantly enhances the Domain Authority metric’s capability. The updated DA now accounts for quality and traffic distributions, offering a comprehensive portrayal of a site’s actual quality beyond mere link counts.
### Implications for SEOs and Link Sellers
Moz Domain Authority is widely utilized by link sellers and Private Blog Networks, as well as SEOs, albeit less favorably by those who understand its limitations. With this update, DA may become less appealing to link buyers but more useful to SEOs.
The broader relevance of the updated Domain Authority lies in its enhanced link analysis capabilities, aligning it more closely with modern search engine link evaluations. By integrating Spam Score metrics, DA’s relationship analysis between websites is expected to improve. The new Domain Authority metric is set to launch next month (March 2019).
