How you can manipulate your MOZ DA

[LesleyPaone]

I have become frustrated at MOZ in the last few months, none of my backlinks have made it into the index. Old back links. Long story short, I figured out the issue and I figured out how anyone can manipulate their DA. I wrote a blog post about it here, http://blog.dh42.com/manipulate-moz/

[LesleyPaone]

These are my main points.

If my links are taking me tweeting them to get added (some are over a year old with good PA) then my competitors need to tweet their backlinks as well. But if they do not know to do that, then the Mozscape that I am looking at for my competitors is seriously out of date as well. If I start noticing positive changes in their sites, I cannot do any kind of research with Mozscape, since the index is outdated.

About your first crawl statement. What you are saying is there are two indexes, correct? One index that has pages with PA and DA assigned. Then another index of pages that have actually been crawled. Then you merge those indexes to make the Mozscape index and pages with PS and DA that have not been crawled are just orphaned and used for the toolbar.

What factors decide whether a page is crawled or just assigned a rank?

And how can Mozscape be deemed accurate without actually using referral url information?

[Matthew_Peters]

Hi Lesley,

The Mozscape index includes both pages that we crawl and pages that we discover links to from crawled pages but do not crawl.  We compute Page Authority for both sets of pages, but can only include links from pages we crawl.  In this case, these are pages that we discovered by crawling other pages but did not crawl them until you tweeted the URLs.

Regarding using traffic data in search ranking and PA/DA:  you are correct that we do not use Google Analytics data from one campaign in another campaign for the privacy reasons you mentioned.  I'd also be surprised if Google uses traffic data from Google Analytics directly in ranking.  In any case, since PA/DA are link authority metrics they only include link based metrics and do not use traffic or any of the other ranking signals (e.g. on page content, brand metrics, etc).  To analyze some of these other factors you can use our Keyword Difficulty tool (http://moz.com/researchtools/keyword-difficulty).  That said, while links are only a piece of the overall Google ranking algorithm they are still generally regarded to be the most important piece (e.g. see the survey and correlation results from our Ranking Factors study: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors).

[LesleyPaone]

I do have a couple of questions then, since you seem to be the person in charge of the area we are talking about.

How does a page get PA and the links not get indexed or added to the index? It would make since if a crawler is used, the links on the page would be crawled and added.

Also, I think it can be demonstrated that Moz is either inherently flawed and cannot be fixed to a usable level without violating people's privacy.

I am going to make a supposition here, that I think a few in the SEO industry might know. Say I make two forum posts, with basically the same content to two pages that have the same PA and DA. One of those links gets 1000 unique clicks, the other one gets no clicks. Also, imagine that both sites run GA. I firmly believe that Google ranks the links differently, and can pretty much back the idea up with my own research.

Back to the privacy. I have my GA account connected to Moz. So do the three sites that I have in my competitive analysis. But Moz won't extract the referral urls from the accounts. That would be considered a huge breach in privacy if I could see which links were actually driving traffic to my competitors sites. At the same time though, a lot of value is lost because this metric is not present. By a lot, I mean most. Basically PA and DA have to be figured using a completely different system than Google uses. Not different because of different developers doing things differently, but different in the sense that if it used the same method, it would be considered a privacy breach.

Where do things go from here, if I can in the end adjust a sites DA and PA at my leisure?

What about my research since, the main links that drive traffic are not included?

[Matthew_Peters]

Hi Lesley,

I'm the head Data Scientist here at Moz and can answer some of your questions about the DA changes you've seen.  You are correct that tweeting a URL will eventually include it in our Mozscape index, nice detective work   The blog post announcing Just Discovered Links that Keri quoted (http://moz.com/blog/announcing-the-just-discovered-links-report) is a little outdated and we are now including these URLs in Mozscape.  This is a recent change that overall increases the freshness of the Mozscape data.

You are also correct that including more links to a site in the Mozscape index will generally improve DA and these links were missing before you tweeted them.  We know that the Mozscape index does miss some links, and are working hard to improve the coverage of all sites in our index.  However, we still believe that PA/DA are valuable as overall summaries of the importance for each page or domain.  For example, PA/DA are well correlated with Google search position (see:  http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors).

[LesleyPaone]

Is this a decent summation of what you are saying? "Our links are not up to date in Mozscape. It should not be used as a tool to determine the ranking factor or backlink weight of your competitors sites." Also in regards to DA authority, "The way we figure it, it is not acceptable for any use".

Correct me when I am wrong about something in my general assumptions.

Every page that Google sees a link on that links to your site either passes page rank, or does not pass page rank.

Factors depend on the follow status, how many other links are on the page, and the domains rank in relation to the domain it is linking to (eg a PR of 3 linking to a PR of 8 does little, but a PR of 8 linking to a PR of 3 does a lot.)

All links that are followed pass some amount of link juice.

If I am right about this, how can Moz be useful other than for detecting onsite issues? I am not looking at an accurate backlink profile on my competitors, there is no metric on why a link is included in the linkscape and not included.

Looking at my links on Mozscape, my referrals in my GA account, and the linking sites in GWMT I see two different sets of links. My GWMT and GA match up pretty well for sites that I have backlinks on that are active backlinks (active meaning someone actually comes to my site from it). In my Mozscape though, none of those links are shown. So I am going out on a limb and guessing that my competitors are not shown either.

So what is the use of Mozscape if highly active links are not shown for any domain?

[KeriMorgret]

Hello Lesley,

I read your post, and wanted to make sure you had seen our blog post about the Just Discovered Links at http://moz.com/blog/announcing-the-just-discovered-links-report. Tela makes a couple of important points in it:

"This index includes valuable links that may be high-quality and topically relevant to your site or specific URL but are new, and thus have a low Page Authority score. This means they may not be included in the Mozscape index until they have been established and earned their own links. With this new index, we expect to uncover high-quality links significantly faster than they would appear in Mozscape.

I want to clarify that we are not injecting URLs from the Just-Discovered Links report into our Mozscape index. We will be able to do this in the future, but we want to gather customer feedback and understand usage before connecting these two indexes. So for now, the indexes are completely separate."

I don't see comments enabled on your blog, so I am not able to make a note of this over there. Could you perhaps amend your post with this information?

[PaddyDisplays]

Interesting article and I understand your frustration, but my understanding is that DA and PA are just a guide line, mimicking google's algo on a much smaller scale and will therefore will miss a lot of the smaller back links.

Also you should not compare DA from month to past months as its value is constantly recalculated, and should on be really used to compare to other website from the same time frame.

But its a good point if a dodgy "SEO Service" used DA as proof of progress to clients they could manipulate the DA to look more impressive.