Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Moz reports way fewer backlinks than google search?
-
My site is only 11 months old but has steadily (if not slowly) been gaining backlinks.
My question, is why Moz shows me at 303 backlinks and Google search console is showing at 1,237?
I am more than a little suspicious that this could highlight the reason Moz shows such an unfavorable DA ranking for our site at a DA12. Other competitors that rank for similar keywords to mine are DA 42, DA 65, DA 73, etc.
If the largest ranking factor is links, and they have mine reported incorrectly - is this the issue with DA as it relates to sites like mine?
Any answer from someone who has experienced similar, or has a definitive answer is more than welcome to chime in!
Thanks, Kevin
-
@samantha-chapman Is there a way to use only the Link Tracking List feature on the MOZ Tools by paying for that specific feature only without a subscription plan. It has been 7 long years and I am also very much frustrated with my DA score. Google Search Console shows that a good number of links has been acquired from quality websites to my website but MOZ doesn't show that.
-
hey, my website is an e-commerce store about casino watches, but my rankings are not improving; I have tried everything, I am not crying out loud, and sales are pretty good, but who does not want more? Please give me suggestions.
-
hey, my website is an e-commerce store about casino watches, but my rankings are not improving; I have tried everything, I am not crying out loud, and sales are pretty good, but who does not want more? Please give me suggestions.
-
There was nothing like that worked for me there so If you please give me suggestions for my this website, please
-
-
Hi there!
Sam from Moz's Help Team here!
So, newly discovered links have the ability to be populated into our index in about 1-3 days, however there are a lot of factors which can affect our ability to find and index links to your site. It's important to note that we add new data to our index everyday but it may take some time for us to discover backlinks to your site based on factors like crawlability of the referring pages, quality of the links and the referring pages, and more.
If you are not seeing links that you know you have, you may want to make sure that they can be indexed. It is also a good idea to check to see if we've indexed the page on which that link is found. If we haven't indexed the referring page yet, you won't see your link in our index
You can also add links to Link Tracking Lists. Once you add a link to your tracking lists we will add that page to be crawled. As long as it is accessible to our crawler, you should see the link in our index as soon as we can index those pages.
Lastly, I have a great guide here with some things to check around why we may not have found your links yet: https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/moz-isnt-finding-your-links
In terms of Domain Authority - Domain Authority in Link Explorer and the Links section of your Moz Campaign correlates with Google rankings to give you an accurate representation of a sites's ranking power.
To understand how to improve DA (Domain Authority) it can help to get some insight into how we gather our data, which I'll include below. Sorry in advance for the long message!
To calculate DA, we index the web by following links using a crawler. Our crawler is built on a machine-learning based model that is optimized to select pages like those that appear in our collection of Google SERPs. We feed the machine learning model with features of the URL like the backlink counts for the URL and the PLD (pay-level domains), features about the URL like its length and how many subdirectories it has, and features on the quality of the domains linking to the URL and PLD. So, it's not based on any one particular metric, but we're training the crawler to start with high-value links.
In terms of improving your Domain Authority, with the information above in mind, it's best to look at both you on-page SEO to make sure you've covered the basics.
Then you also want to look at your off-site SEO and building more links more links to your site.
There are lots of different areas of Link Building to explore, from patching up broken links, improving your internal link profile, and good ol' fashioned content creation.
Here is a great video by our founder Rand which goes over some easy link building tactics to get you started.I hope that helps to start you off! Feel free to reach out to help@moz.com if you have any other questions!
-
Hi,
I'm making good link to my site : Vaunte But its still not getting index and not making a impact on my websites DA. PLease tell me that how I increase my websites DA.
Thanks
-
Firstly, PA / DA are shadow metrics. In the old days SEOs used to use TBPR (Toolbar PageRank) to evaluate the worth of pages, which was a publicly available (yet very watered down) variant of Google's official PageRank algorithm metric
When Google took away TBPR, the search industry needed a new metric to evaluate the worth of web pages. As such data suppliers like Moz (PA / DA), Majestic SEO (CF / TF) and Ahrefs (URL Rating / Domain Rating) stepped up to fill that gap. It's important to remember that Google still uses 'actual' PageRank (which SEOs have never seen) in their ranking algorithm, and not Moz's PA / DA metrics. They are meant to give a rough approximation of web-page worth, but Moz doesn't have the same digital infrastructure which Google has. Google can find way more links, way more web-pages
Moz's index of backlinks is probably 1/10 or less than what Google can see. But despite having loads of lucrative data, Google have been very stubborn in terms of making it usable for webmasters. As such we (in SEO) usually have to aggregate metrics from loads of backlink data suppliers (PA, DA, CF, TF, Domain Rating, URL Rating) and boil it down as we see fit. If you just go with one single data supplier you are usually operating your insights along very narrow data samples. It's only by drawing it all together, that you can get real conclusions!
Most ranking factors are relatively equally balanced. There's stuff like EAT, Google penalties (which can annihilate your ranking power, even with strong links), content quality etc. To say that one ranking factor is significantly larger than the others is, IMO, totally inaccurate. SEO is more about effort than it is about isolating magic bullet solutions (which pretty much don't exist in modern SEO!)
If your DA is under-inflated as a result of Moz's smaller backlink index (smaller than Google's) then your competitor's should be suffering from the same thing and it should (roughly speaking) balance out. At the end of the day though, DA is merely an indicator. Google don't use Moz's DA in their ranking algorithms. What really matters is your SEO traffic intake and what you do with it (CRO / UX)
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
-
Conflicting average position data from Google Search Console?
I'm looking at Google Search Console data in Google Analytics, specifically Average Position as given in the Landing Page report, and the same metric broken out by mobile and desktop in the Devices report. In the Landing Page report, I see an aggregated average position that's much higher/worse than an actual average of what is reported for mobile, desktop and tablet traffic under the Device reporting. For example: Mobile: 5 Desktop: 5 Tablet: 5 So the average still should be roughly 5, right? Why would the Landing Page then show an aggregate Average Position of 8? I wouldn't expect to see a precisely same average given that different device types have different proportions that could render differently when the buckets are combined, but this is a huge swing. In fact, the aggregate Average Position as given in the top level Devices report is closer to 5 than to the 8 shown in the Landing Pages report. (These aren't actual numbers, but are illustrative of what I'm seeing, by the way.) Unless I'm missing some vital difference in the way that Average Position is reporting for the Landing Page report versus the Device reports, it doesn't seem like this should be possible. What am I missing?
Reporting & Analytics | | BradsDeals0 -
How can I track my rankings on Google Images?
I noticed a small amount of traffic coming from a particular very generic keyword. Being pleasantly surprised that we are ranking for this, and after some digging, I found that we are actually ranking in Google images, rather than in the web results. How can I track whether other keywords are ranking in Google images? I use Rank Checker to track keywords in the main web results, but this doesn't have a function for Google Images. Help please - thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | TheJewelleryEd0 -
Google as referring domain
Hi all, a colleague asked a question, which I could not answer (never even noticed this "problem") 😞 When we are logged into our GA account and go the referring domains section, we find Google. I always thought that these visitors came via Google Image Search, but not all of them do. Most of them come via "/imgres", but some come via "/" (always thought that "/" was the homepage?), "/url" and "//" Maybe I am just stupid, but honestly I could not explain what these strings mean... or how these visitors landed on our site... Can you help me???
Reporting & Analytics | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Google Analytics and DNS change
Our new alumni application is going be tested at domain uva.imodules.com . We are going to collect traffic data with a Google analytics account number UA-884652-XX. So going to uva.imodules.com/myPage.html would send its data to Google Analytics with that account number. Then when it is ready for production we are going to just change the domain name of the application and switch the DNS over to dardencommunity.darden.virginia.edu . So going to dardencommunity.darden.virginia.edu /myPage.html would send its data to Google Analtics with that SAME account number. Aside from having the testing domain data in the same profile are there any other issues/problems we may run into?
Reporting & Analytics | | Darden0 -
Setting up Google Analytics default URL
If someone has set: the default url in Google Analytics to a non-www address (http://mysite.com) then placed the UA tracking script from that GA account within the CMS framework of the website... ... and then set the permanent 301 redirect in the htaccess file to redirect to the www address (http://www.mysite.com). How less accurrate will my GA analytics measurements be considering the default url within GA is non-www and the permanent 301 redirect in htacess is to the www-address? Anyone know how reliable GA reports are until the default url in GA analytics is changed to match what is the redirected url in htaccess file? _Cindy
Reporting & Analytics | | CeCeBar0 -
How are 301s reported in GA?
Does anyone have any insight on exactly how on-site 301s are reported in Google Analytics? My direct traffic seems to climb at the same rate as my organic with absolutely no off-line promotion. I have a suspicion that the 301s that I have built to re-coupe traffic being sent to old pages are being reported as direct. Any validity to this?
Reporting & Analytics | | NextGenEDU0 -
Google Analytics: how many visits from country Google domains?
Hello, I manage a site with visitors from many different countries. With Google Analytics, it is normal to see the number of visitors from each search engine. However, I would like to identify the number of visitors from each Google-search contry domain. How many visitors from Google.com? How many from Google.co.uk. And from Google.co.zm? And so on. Anybody knows if this is possible and if yes, how can it be done? Thank you in advance, Dario
Reporting & Analytics | | Darioz0 -
Why does Google Analytics think PPC traffic is organic?
I have a bastard of a problem... Google Analytics is incorrectly tracking PPC traffic as SEO which is screwing up all my reporting . I don't care for rankings, I care for actual SEO traffic and I can't be sure that what i am seeing is correct which is driving me nuts. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | Red_Mud_Rookie1