Yahoo Site Explorer died. Does DA and PA Seomoz parameters have all it takes to replace YSE?
-
We're trying to simplify our link analysis job when acquiring a new external link. We're wondering to know if Domain Authority Seomoz parameter is all what we need to take a decision.
Does DA Seomoz parameter takes into consideration 'domain age', 'alexa ranking', 'dmoz links', indexed pages on google', and 'inbound links vs outbound links'?
-
A few thoughts regarding your guidelines:
It can take 60 days for the PA of a new page to be updated in OSE. If the page you are attempting to acquire a link from is new I would not be concerned about the page's PA at all.
The Domain Age is not a factor I would consider at all when acquiring a link.
Toolbar PR is only updated every 3-4 months so you wont know the true PA of a page, especially if it is a new page.
I would recommend the following primary considerations when acquiring links: site DA, popularity of the page which offers the link (if it is a new page, what is the expected PA/PR of the page in 90 days), relevance of site and page and the location of the link (in content, footer, etc).
-
Hi! I've read Matt's blog post Introducing SEOmoz's Updated Page Authority and Domain Authority and now we better understand how PA and DA works. You guys do a really good job!
We check the metrics of hundreds of pages and domains when acquiring new links and that's why is very important for us to make this fast.
Now that Y!SE died and we better understand how PA and DA works we conclude that we'll be checking the following factors before acquiring new links:
- PA: should be 25+
- DA: should be 25+
- IP: links should not be from the same C class.
- Domain Age: at least 1 year old
- Indexed Pages: at least more than 30.
- IP Neighborhood: domain should not have more than 2 spammy sites on its neighborhood.
- Context and Relevance: according to target keyword.
- PR: page rank should be 1+.
- Google Cache: no more than 2 weeks latency.
We thinks that the metrics above are all what we need BUT honestly still too much to check. Seems that nobody has the magic wand!
Are we missing something? Checking more than should I check?
-
Just figured I'd toss in my $0.02.
As others have noted, Y!SE offered no metrics as to the importance/influence of a site or page in its index, so there's really nothing to compare it with. Google offers PageRank, which Linkscape also has (mozRank). But PA and DA are designed to be predictive algorithms with tons of inputs that try to best reflect how Google.com (US) values links and link metrics.
Matt Peters, our data scientist, has a blog post going up in the next few days with details about how we do this and what PA/DA are from a technical standpoint, but you can basically think of them as the best correlated query/content-agnostic metrics for Google rankings (at least, we've never measured something that could better predict rank position).
-
Will be really useful for the SEO community to see a detail of what specific metrics DA takes into consideration.
The link I shared above shows all the details.
Maybe the DA parameter became the new standard
Many SEOs have used DA as a standard for some time. When there was a problem with the Linkscape crawler a lot of SEOs were quite vocally upset as they even shared DA with clients in reporting, and this reporting was impacted by the issues experienced at the time.
Do you think there's place to improve it? We want only 1parameter for everything.
DA is the most solid form of an all-encompassing parameter. It is far from perfect, and will not be even close in 2012 and likely much longer. There are numerous major considerations which need to be considered such as: impact of social sharing, penalties, link valuation by location (footer vs in content), relevance and more.
The bottom line is Google's algorithm is hidden and likely will always be kept private. It also includes hundreds of factors. It's a struggle in futility and the impossible to mimic Google's ranking. With that said, DA is a solid attempt at a critical metric which is part of that process.
-
Thanks Ryan for your input!
Cyprus, as you said, you can't add into the DA parameter the Link Relevance and Context, but what about other metrics? Do you think there's place to improve it? We want only 1parameter for everything.
Will be really useful for the SEO community to see a detail of what specific metrics DA takes into consideration. Maybe the DA parameter became the new standard
-
I really like Ryan's answer, and I'm going to endorse it.
If you are only looking for ONE metric to judge links, then DA or PA wouldn't be a bad choice. Certainly better than the old PageRank. But I wouldn't advise using just one metric.
DA takes all of SEOmoz link metrics into consideration, including MozTrust and MozRank. Of all the metrics out there, it is best indicator of a given domain's (or page's) ability to rank for a particular phrase. We know of no other publicly available measurement that does as good of job.
That said, it shouldn't be the only thing you should look at when evaluating link prospect. Relevance, Context, number of links on the page, position and other considerations should all be brought into play.
Best of luck in your link building!
-
Everything you wanted to know about Domain Authority can be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority
A few other notes:
Alexa Ranking is not a relevant metric for most aspects of SEO. Overall the ranking has been shown to be highly inaccurate for most sites and it is very easy to manipulate. I like to look at Alexa ranking to gain a rough initial idea of a site's popularity, and that's it.
Domain age isn't a relevant metric for most aspects of SEO either. There are brand new domains with high PR and 10 yr old domains with low PR. Any correlation between a site's age and it's PR seems to be simply from the idea that older sites have had more time to earn links.
Open Site Explorer does capture a site's links whether they are from dmoz or any other site. OSE also can differentiate between internal and external links.
I can see the value in adding "indexed pages on Google" to OSE. That request will quickly expand to indexed pages of the various Google sites for each country, and then to Bing as well.
I am all for adding additional metrics to support SEO. I only ask the metrics be relevant information which can be used to understand or improve SEO performance.
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
-
Not provided Data in SEOMoz reports
Hi How do SeoMoz reports deal with 'not provided' data I see my total visits from organic search for a month are same as total of both my branded and non branded keyword traffic combined yet GA is reporting 157 visits from non provided data so is SEOMoz being very clever and finding a way to decipher this not provided data and allocate it accordingly in the reports ? Or if not what ? Many Thanks Dan
Moz Pro | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Is there a way to export keywords from SEOMOZ?
Hi, is there a way to export keywords of a campaign in SEOMOZ? The other way around to import including labels? Best
Moz Pro | | ValerieSchmidt0 -
Why site is getting ranked in top three positions on Bing and Yahoo but not in Google?
My site Business-Training-Schools.com is getting descent traffic from Bing and Yahoo but very little from Google. Can you please help me in finding out the root cause of it?
Moz Pro | | HQP0 -
New To SEOMOZ, 2 Questions...
Hi, 1. I got signed up with SEOMOZ yesterday and would like to know about the competitive analysis tool. I saw in a demo video of SEOMOZ that there was an aspect of Social links (Facebook etc) included in the analysis, I can't see this in my analysis however. 2. Is it possible to change websites over time? Let say in a few months I want to work on a new website, can I remove one of my 5 and add a new one? Thanks! James
Moz Pro | | James10 -
Open Site Explorer Question!
Hi, I have performed a search on a root domain and the page auth is higher then the domain auth? I would have thought they would have been the same or at least the other way around!
Moz Pro | | activitysuper0 -
Canonical tags and SEOmoz crawls
Hi there. Recently, we've made some changes to http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/ to implement canonical tags to some dynamically generated pages to stop duplicate content issues. Previously, these were blocked with robots.txt. In Webmaster Tools, everything looks great - pages crawled has shot up, and overall traffic and sales has seen a positive increase. However the SEOmoz crawl report is now showing a huge increase in duplicate content issues. What I'd like to know is whether SEOmoz registers a canonical tag as preventing a piece of duplicate content, or just adds to it the notices report. That is, if I have 10 pages of duplicate content all with correct canonical tags, will I still see 10 errors in the crawl, but also 10 notices showing a canonical has been found? Or, should it be 0 duplicate content errors, but 10 notices of canonicals? I know it's a small point, but it could potentially have a big difference. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | neooptic0 -
Certain Domains no longer recognised by open site explorer
Afternoon everyone (well, it is for me), We've been tracking the linking root domains to our domain for around 6 months now, alongside tracking these domains we have also been engaging in linking building activities. Our initial activities worked quite well with linking domains rising from around 620 to 720 in 3 months. However, recently we have seen those numbers begin to fall away, in many cases it is because certain domains have stopped linking to us, have become no=follow sites or have been archived. But, in some cases we can see the link is still there, and is being registered by other tools such as yahoo or webmaster tools. My question is really, does anyone have a way of working out why a link, that was in the past being registered by open site explorer, is no longer registering and presumably no longer passing over juice to help with domain authority. What kind of signals should i be looking for to tackle a 'decaying' link? Looking forward to hear your thoughts!
Moz Pro | | NigelJ0 -
Will Open Site Explorer ever show number of links over time?
OSE is an amazing tool, but do you guys at SEOmoz have any plans to develop it so we can track numbers of links over time. I need to demonstrate to clients how the link building is going, and this would be a great quick report to see how many links you found on a given day, month, year, etc. A bit like magesticSEO backlink history graph, but better 🙂
Moz Pro | | timwills0