Moz Playing Catch Up On Domain Authority Metrics
When you are a blogger with an aim to monetise your work, domain authority (DA) is an essential metrics you will be looking at. It’s not so much that you love the DA metric yourself, but most SEO and PR companies will look at DA to decide which blogs to work with. DA is not something that is dished up by Google in say Search Console, but a metric developed by one of the leading SEO tools professionals use: Moz. Moz has recently come under scrutiny and has switched up the way the tool works.
Moz is a SaaS (software as a service) solution that sells inbound marketing and marketing analytics solutions. It was founded as a blog and online community where the world’s first SEO pioneers could discuss and theorise on Google’s inner workings. They launched things like the Beginner’s Guide to SEO and the very first Search Ranking Factors whitepapers. In time, from this research and consulting work, the primary SEO tools were built to help SEO professionals all over the world. Companies like seoexplode can utilise these tools and translate them to sound SEO strategies.
In terms of tools, the Moz suite went through different iterations but now has settled on Moz Pro and Moz Local. Dependant on the package you go for, you will be able to track your rankings, crawl and audit your site, find content suggestion and link opportunities. By no means, Moz is the only toolset that offers this, and you could find free versions of the individual, and maybe even all, features in other software packages. Why Moz has become the industry standard is the so-called DA rankings.
Google notoriously does not share what’s going on with the rankings and how they are determined. They are even secretive on new algorithm releases, only dropping cryptic hints. The DA rankings aim to shine some light on Google’s inner workings.
On a logarithmic scale, you have a score from 1 to 100. With 1 being the worst and 100 the very best. The logarithmic scale accentuates that improving from 3 to say 8 is relatively easy, but as you get better it gets harder to improve.
Going from say 60 to 61 will take considerable effort and work. The DA score itself represents a predictive value of how well a website will do in the rankings.
See it as a very accurate weather predictor and the actual rankings being the actual weather experienced.
The DA rankings in Moz have been the cornerstone in the SEO world for quite some time. However, it seems there has been some disparity between the DA rankings and the actual performance of websites on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). With Google cracking down on paid and spammy links to push the best content to the top of the SERP, it has been employing a vast plethora of continually smarter solutions, namely AI and machine learning of late.
In February of 2019 Moz announced they have upgraded their methods to calculate DA, more akin to how Google is determining these rankings. By no means, it is considered to be a finished product (can it ever be?), but it is a step in the right direction ensuring a fair and honest prediction of the SERP.