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.
Questions created by Dr-Pete
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Comparing New vs. Old Keyword Difficulty Scores
We've had a few questions regarding the new Keyword Difficulty score used in Keyword Explorer, and how it compares to the old score in our stand-alone Keyword Difficulty tool. Specifically, people want to know why some scores are much lower using the new tool. There a general discussion of the math behind the tool in this post: Keyword Research in 2016: Going Beyond Guesswork One of the problems we had with the original Keyword Difficulty score is that, because it's based on our Page Authority (PA) score and PA tends toward the middle of the 0-100 range, Difficulty got a bit bunched up. A Difficulty score in the low-to-mid 20s (via the old tool) is actually very low. So, we set out to re-scale the new tool to broaden that score and use more of the 0-100 range. We hoped this would allow more granularity and better comparisons. While the logic is sound, we're concerned that we may have been too aggressive in this re-scaling, given recent feedback. So, we're going to be analyzing a large set of keywords (anonymously, of course) that people have run through the tool to see if too many Difficulty scores seem too low. If they do, we'll make some adjustments to the math. In the meantime, please be aware that low scores may appear lower in the new tool and very high scores may appear higher. We wanted to address some of the limitations in V1 and feedback over the years, and so the old and new scores really can't be compared directly in a meaningful way. We're sorry for any confusion that has caused, and we will re-evaluate if necessary.
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