Why would a site w/lower metrics across the board have the highest DA?
-
We are competing with other national brands and have a competitor who is NOT a national brand and who does NOT have any metrics ranking higher. With the latest SEOMoz metric update this week, they (hawaiianjewelryshop) now have the highest DA in Link Analysis. Has anyone else experienced this? Can SEOMoz explain this for us, please? It would be great if Matt Peters would respond to this question.
The sites in question are:
www.nahoku.com
www.mauidivers.com
www.hawaiianjewelryshop.com
www.jared.com -
Hi JP Moulin,
Thanks for your question. Rand and The Back Burner already did a good job explaining some things about PA/DA so I'll stick to looking at the numbers.
I looked at the top level metrics for these four sites in Open Site Explorer:
Site PA DA # Linking Root domains # Links
www.nahoku.com 51 41 196 3695
www.mauidivers.com 53 43 228 4274
www.jared.com 59 51 283 871
www.hawaiianjewelryshop.com 60 52 325 5890
These look pretty well ordered based on these numbers to me (more links + linking domains => higher PA/DA) with the possible exception of www.jared.com which is a bit of an outlier with 283 linking root domains and only 871 links. In this case, the domain links are boosting it's PA/DA. The new model prefers metrics associated with link diversity/domain signals (linking root domains, linking C-blocks, etc) over the old one and this is what's happening with www.jared.com.
-
Well, first, DA is only a small part of SEOMoz campaigns. Personally I use the competitive analysis to monitor the links my competition are getting, the ranking report to track SERP performance, and the Error report to track and fix on-site issues. Those are the areas where the monthly fee really pays for itself, in my opinion.
And again, if you're beating your competition in rankings, then I would worry less about their DA and more about converting all that extra traffic you get into sales.
-
Some good things to know about DA: - It's using an algorithm that examines PA across a domain - It's not a perfect metric by any means (though it is, on average, the best correlated domain-wide metric for estimating a site's performance in Google's SERPs) - The range of correlations is in the 0.15-0.25 area depending on the index update and on Google's changes, so we're still talking about something that only explains a small portion of why a site may rank (page-level factors, anchor text, user/usage data, social data, personalization, goegraphy, etc. are not taken into account) - When a site's DA is higher, but other metrics are lower, it probably has something to do with the link distribution across the site and/or the types of links pointing at the site. That said, definitely will ask Matt to jump in here and have a look. In terms of your request for a $100/month service having better accuracy - as I noted, DA is the best metric we've seen (or any webmaster/SEO I know has seen/measured). It's incredibly hard to build a link index, very hard to calculate a link graph, and then super tough to build a ranking model against thousands of Google's results. I agree that we should be better and we're always working toward that (see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/introducing-seomoz-updated-page-authority-and-domain-authority); this is just an insanely hard problem, due to the massive technology and algorithmic requirements involved in understanding and mathematically quantifying how Google ranks pages.
-
Thanks The Back Burner. The site does not rank higher than us for the targeted keyword, but their DA blows us out of the water. I think (very roughly) is a fair assessment, but how can you use the SEOMoz report (if it's so off) to come up with a strategic plan? I would expect this sort of variance from a free service, but not one that is $100/mo. I look forward to Matt Peter's response.
-
Does this site rank higher than you for your targeted keywords?
I checked out www.nahoku.com and if "hawaiian slipper" is one of your keywords (it's in your page title) then there's no reason to worry - you rank #2 and hawaiianjewelryshop.com doesn't even show up in the top ten.
Building higher DA is good, but as long as you are ranking well for the keyword terms you want to target then you're doing well.
Remember that DA is for reference only - it is most useful as a high-level way to quickly gauge (very roughly) where a site stands.
In the end the only thing that matters for your site is whether you are ranking highly for the terms you want to target and converting the traffic you get from those keywords into sales.
-
Thanks gmkrish for that resource. I would love to hear from the engineers. I love the summary screens but they don't seem insightful at all. Would the better way be to go through OSE, export to spreadsheet, and sort by different metrics for each competitor? Seems like a lot of work for this kind of insight.
-
I too love to hear from SEOMOZ team. In the meantime you may read the answer from Randy for a question related to Domain authority.
http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/32040/what-are-the-component-metrics-of-domain-authority
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
-
Why my site not crawl?
hi all me allow rogerbot in robots.txt but rogerbot can't crawl my site my site: toska-co.ir
Moz Pro | | jahanidawodi0 -
Working with Open Site Explorer
Hi everyone, I'm new to keyword analysis, and am in the process of consuming a lot of SEOmoz articles and resources on the subject. I wanted to see if I'm correct in my analysis of two compared sites, and hope you can shed some light on the matter. I've been to the Google Keyword Tool and looked for my informational keywords for the project I'm working on, since the user intent is all about information. A not-so-great keyword phrase I've found with 12,100 local monthly searches is: "programa de inglês" (english programme) I'm just using this as a quick example. I have performed a Google search query for the above phrase from google.com.br (Brazil), and I'm comparing the #2 and #4 results from the 1st page of the SERPs which are: #2) www.programa-ingles.net and #4) http://www.baixaki.com.br/categorias/educacao-e-diversao.htm. What's confusing me is that in Open Site Explorer, the #4 result gets a much higher page authority compared to the #2 result, and beats #2 on every category except for internal–external link ratio and all the social categories. Here's an image attached of the comparison. Is it the fact that the external links of #2 account for 100% of the links pointing to it, or that the #2 position beats (rather pitifully) #5 on social sharing, or is it something that I've not stumbled across yet? Thanks in advance for helping out a n00b. 6HU6hBi.png
Moz Pro | | featherseo0 -
Why does site explorer keep crashing?
For around the last 24 hours, every time I run site explorer it gets to just over a quarter of the way through and then just stops. I've tried this with different sites and it makes no difference. Although this is the first time I've had this problem (I don't use the tool regularly myself) one of my colleagues says it often happens to her. Is this a problem SEOmoz can explain and/or fix?
Moz Pro | | Chuck-Boom0 -
Why Is SEOMOZ No Longer crawling All Of My Site
Hi all, I joined Seomoz over a month ago and Roger has been crawling all of the pages on the site approx 20 pages. Through out the last few weeks I have been working on the errors and notices identified by Roger. However, this week Roger has only re-crawled 1 page and is not picking up all the other pages. Has any one come across this problem. can you recommend any thing to resolve it? Many thanks in advance....
Moz Pro | | Dan280 -
Why does Open Site Explorer show less inbound links than yahoo site Explorer?
Hello, We have a question regarding inbound link measurement. We used to measure our inbound links with yahoo site explorer. Now that it's been shut down we use opensiteexplorer.org. However, Open Site Explorer only shows a fraction of inbound links compared to yahoo site explorer. For our website www.theprintspace.co.uk yahoo site explorer measured approx. 14,000 inbound links, whereas open Site Explorer only counts approx. 3,000. This is more than 10,000 links less. For our other website www.theprintspace.de Open Site Explorer also shows 3000 links less than Yahoo. How can this be? Does Open Site Explorer count the links in a different way to Yahoo? Please explain. It would be great if you could help us with this. Thank you!
Moz Pro | | Waplington0 -
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 -
Site not showing data in Open Site Explorer
I have run open site explorer for a couple of sites but I am getting the "no data available for this URL" message. I have read the reasons listed on the error message but none of these apply to the particular sites I am looking for data from. Any thoughts as to why this might be? Thanks, Kwan
Moz Pro | | SocialKwan0 -
Site is showing forwarded /301 to another website
My site http://riyas.in is showing a 301 redirect or a forward to http://flicker.com/muhammedriyas . I had done a 301 redirect long before from my site to this domain, but i removed that after 2-3 days. Please help me to solve this problem. I attached a screen shot seomoz1.jpg
Moz Pro | | riyas_0