How much attention should I pay to Moz's DA/PA?
-
Hola!
I've been optimising a site since October and our hard work has yielded a sizeable increase in organic traffic, revenue, quality, relevant links and Search Metrics scoring since commencing the campaign.
After yesterday's Moz update, the DA has dropped slightly and a number of pages' PAs have dropped significantly (i.e. from 27 to 17). So here are my questions:
- My 'white hat' optimisation is clearly working. The site is enjoying more than 100% year-on-year increase in organic traffic and we're currently pulling in more organic visitors than ever before. Why is Moz's score not reflecting this?
- Some of the pages that have seen sizeable PA drops have had their URLs changed since the last Moz update. For example, I've optimised a URL from www.mysite.com/cases-covers to www.mysite.com/phone-cases to coincide with search volumes. I've added optimised content to this page too, but the PA has dipped from 27 to 17. A 301 redirect has been correctly added, and this is evident by a PA of 17 and not zero, which is what a brand new page would have.
- Am I paying too much attention to Moz's scores? It's a bit disheartening to see a drop after a lot of hard work. However, I guess the only thing that really counts is an increased volume of search traffic and revenue, right?
Cheers,
Lewis
-
Thanks all for the great responses... as usual!
-
In addition to Don and Matt's excellent answers, I'd only add that you're giving the right priority to how you're measuring the performance of your site: increases in sales, increases in organic traffic, relevant links, and referral visits. Ultimately tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic are comparative samplings of the net and not the defacto proxy of Google. If they're helping you build out your network and find new places where you can connect then you're doing well.
-
Hi Lewis,
Rand just posted about DA/PA with their recent huge crawl update. Here
"..This means that DA and PA scores may fluctuate more than usual, as link diversity are big parts of those calculations and we've crawled a much larger swath of the deep, dark corners of the web (and non-US/non-.com domains, too)..."
Even with that, I really try to pay more attention to what you mentioned, user engagement, click-through, in-bound links, organic traffic and on our retail site; SALES! Google has really been shaking things up, I've seen more often then not lower pa/da pages higher in SERPS then ever before. While I don't have anything to point to prove this is true, we all know Google's goal is to provide the best possible pages for a users search.
Just because a domain / page has been around since Al Gore invented the internet and has a high da/pa doesn't mean it is the most relevant for today's Googlers.
-
PA & DA are a place to start but the index is so small compared to the net in general that you can't really just say "this is" the score or not. I've seen sites that Moz lists 20-50 backlinks and Majestic links 15,000. Same with Ahrefs.
I saw a client just today with: 100 Moz, 1500 Ahrefs, 9000 Majestic. I always assume Majestic may see about 30% of my links. That means a site with 27,000 links, Moz sees 100 sometimes. How accurate can it be with 1 out of every 270 links?
Also, the opposite can be true. Google may not have picked up on a link or three that Moz did pick up. Also, Moz can't see disavows so if you get rid of 49 out of 50 links, Moz may give you a higher (or lower) PA/DA than your site deserves.
There's a lot to it - I would use it as a guide but don't judge your SEO efforts by a 5 point PA rise or fall.
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
-
Integrating Moz with DashThis
I'm trying out DashThis as a way to visualize data for clients with whom we do a combo of SEO, PPC, and SEM work. I like the main Moz Pro campaign dashboard page for distilling top-level information and the rankings page for tracking keyword ranks. In an ideal world, I'd love to be able to sort replicate these within DashThis. I see that DashThis does integrate with Moz but looking at the Mozscape API documentation I couldn't tell if this type of integration is possible in DashThis. I realize this is a super specific question, but I thought I'd ask the community if this integration is possible or if I have more limited range of options.
API | | TheKatzMeow0 -
/index.php causing a few issues
Hey Mozzers, Our site uses magento. Pages within the site (not categories or products) are set to display as www.domain.co.uk/page-url/ The hta access is set to redirect all version such as www.domain.co.uk/page-url to a url ending in a / However in google analytics and in moz landing page tracker these urls are being represented by www.domain.co.uk/page-url/index.php When visiting www.domain.co.uk/page-url/index.php a 404 is displayed. I know that by default when directed to a directory it automatically finds and displays the index file. So i understand why this is happening to some degree. However, when manually visiting this link does not exist. This poses a problem when trying to view the landing pages information in moz pro. I have 20 keywords being tracked in relation to www.domain.co.uk/page-url/ but because moz is recording it as www.domain.co.uk/page-url/index.php the keywords are unrelated so not showing information in relation to the page. Any ideas?
API | | ATP0 -
Moz Thumbs not working? @MozHelp
Hi all, I'm noticing an issue with Moz thumbs. Last night before bed, I am pretty positive I gave EGOL and Laura a thumbs up for their answers to this question. This morning I noticed there were no thumbs up for their responses. At first I thought maybe I didn't give them a thumbs up, and proceeded to thumb them again. Everything appeared to work, however after returning to the post I noticed my thumbs didn't appear to be recorded. Has anybody noticed this issue?
API | | donford0 -
Moz api request problem fail (status 401)
Hello! I'm getting an error for seomoz call using API: {"status":"401","error_message":"Your authentication failed. Check your authentication details and try again. For more information on signed authentication, see: http://apiwiki.moz.com/signed-authentication"} Can you help me?
API | | leoh0 -
Can't remove "insights" section from report.
The items in the "insights" section of the Moz report have an "x" which can be clicked in the designer to dismiss this data from the report. However, these items still shows up in the report anyways. Buggy. How can we work around this bug?
API | | Webformix0 -
Suggestion - How to improve OSE metrics for DA & PA
I am sure everyone is aware at Moz, that although the Moz link metrics ( primarily I am talking about DA & PA) are good, there is a lot of room for improvement, and that there are a lot of areas where the metric values given to some types of site are well out of whack with what their "real" values should be. Some examples
API | | James77
www.somuch.com (Link Directory) - DA 72
www.articlesbase.com (Article Directory) - DA 89
www.ezinearticles.com (Article Directory) - DA 91 I'm sure everyone would agree that links from these domains are not as powerful (if of any value at all), as their DA would suggest, and therefore by definition of how moz metrics work, the sites these have links from such sites are also inflated - thus they throw the whole link graph out of whack. I have 2 suggestions which could be used to singularly or in conjunction (and obviously with other factors that Moz use to calculate DA and PA) which could help move these values to what they should more realistically be. 1/. Incorporate rank values.
This is effectively using rank values to reverse engine what google (or other engines) as a "value" on a website. This could be achieved (if moz were not to build the data gathering system itself), by intergrating with a company that already provides this data - eg searchmetrics, semrush etc. As an example you would take a domian and pull in some rank values eg http://www.semrush.com/info/somuch.com?db=us - where you could use traffic, traffic price, traffic history as a metric as part of the overall Moz scoring alogrithm. As you can see from my example according to SEMRush the amount of traffic and traffic price is extreamly low for what you would expect of a website that has a DA of 72. Likewise you will find this for the other two sites and similarly to pretty much any other site you will test. This is essentially because your tapping into Googles own ranking factors, and thereby more inline with what real values (according to Google) are with respect to the quality of a website. Therefore if you were to incorporate these values, I believe you could improve the Moz metrics. 2/. Social Sharing Value
Another strong indicator of quality the amount of social sharing of a document or website as a whole, and again you will find as with my examples, that pages on these sites have low social metrics in comparison to what you would normally associate with sites of these DA values. Obviously to do this you would need to pull social metrics of all the pages in your link DB. Or if this we to tech intense to achieve, again work with a partner such as searchmetrics, which provide "Total Social Interations" on a domain level basis. Divide this value by the number of Moz crawled pages and you would have a crude value of the overall average social scorability of a webpage on a given site. Obviously both the above, do have their flaws if you looked at them in complete isolation, however in combination they could provide a robust metric to use in any alogrithm, and in combination with current moz values used in the alogrithm I believe you could make big strides into improving overall Moz metrics.1 -
How to best use MOZ api?
i love the idea of the api - but need a tool to access it. having seen the seogadget excel addin, but unable to use it with my MAC. Do you have a recommendation for using api without writing my own code? Thanks, in advance!
API | | robertdonnell0