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 Website DA and Rankings are not improving
It's been about 3 months my Website DA and Ranking are constant. What should i do about it? I am generating good quality links and syndicating Content in different website but no Help.
Moz Pro | | rashmibhardwaj860 -
Why is MOZ crawl is returning URLs with variable results showing Missing Meta Desc? Example: http://nw-naturals.net/?page_number_0=47
Can you help me dive down into my website guts to find out why the MOZ crawl is returning URLs with variable results? And saying this is missing a description when it's not really a page? Example: http://nw-naturals.net/?page_number_0=47. I've asked MOZ but it's a web development issue so they can't help me with it. Has anyone had an issue with this on their website? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | lewisdesign0 -
Wild Fluctuations With Yahoo/Bing Moz Report
Whenever I get my weekly custom report, I usually see steady but moderate gains in Google or slight drops 1 to 3 spots. But, with Yahoo/Bing it's just crazy. +25 here, -47 here, etc, etc. Also, we even have keywords that we rank in the top 3 on with google, but not the top 50 with Bing or Yahoo. Not sure how that's possible. Nor do I understand how if Bing powers Yahoo, how we can have reports that show a dramatic increase (or decline) in Bing, but the opposite in Yahoo. Granted, not all the rankings are like that for Bing and Yahoo, but there are so many discrepancies, I'm starting to wonder if it's a software problem or something. Does this happen to anyone else? Thanks, Ruben
Moz Pro | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Having 1 page crawl error on 2 sites
Help! A few weeks back, my dev team did some "changes" (that I don't know anything about), but ever since then, my Moz crawl has only shown one page for either http://betamerica.com or http://fanex.com. Moz service was helpful in talking about a redirect loop that existed, and I asked my team to fix it, which it looks to me like they have. Still, 1 page. I used SEO Book's spider tool and it also only sees 1 page, and sees the sites as http://https://betamerica.com (for example), which is just weird. I don't know enough about HT Access or server stuff to figure out what's going on, so if someone can help me figure that out, I'd appreciate it.
Moz Pro | | BetAmerica0 -
Site Explorer shows links as followable but they have nofollow tags
Hello, I am looking at site explorer and sites linking to my site moneyfact.co.uk. I've got thousands of links showing as 'followable' but when i check them they have rel="nofollow" tags. e.g: http://www.dianomioffers.co.uk/partner/moneyfacts.co.uk/brochures.epl?partner=93&partner_id=93&partner_variant_id=33 Why would they show as followable when the links are nofollowed? Thanks Steve
Moz Pro | | SteveBrumpton0 -
I need country specific ranking reports for our Google/Yahoo/Bing positions
Hi Guys, Using the ranking reports given here at SeoMoz I cannot select various countries as it seems to only provide US Google/Yahoo/Bing results. I need ranking reports specifically for Thailand, UK, States, Australia, India, Hong Kong. Does anyone know of any such tools? Many thanks in advance.
Moz Pro | | ewanTHH0 -
New site on page check
hello wonderful Mozzers, I am building a new site and was wondering if any of you knew any latest " thorough" ON Page Check Lists? I want to make sure I build the site right, and do every bit of on page and new site seo right. I have access to the SEOMOZ guides as well. Have a fab day guys, Best, Vijay
Moz Pro | | vijayvasu0 -
Fetch googlebot for sites you don't own?
I've used the "fetch as googlebot" tool in Google webmaster tools to submit links from my site, but I was wondering if there was any type of tool or submission process like this for submitting links from other sites that you do not own? The reason I ask is, I worked for several months to get a website to accept my link as part of their dealer locator tool. The link to my site was published a few months ago, however I don't think google has found it and the reason could be because you have to type in your zip code to get the link to appear. This is the website that I am referencing: http://www.ranchhand.com/dealers.php?zip=78070&radius=20 (my website is www.rangeroffroad.com) Is there any way for Google to index the link? Any ideas?
Moz Pro | | texmeix0