Moz announced that they are planning for an upgrade on the domain authority metric. Domain authority measures the value of a domain based on its ranking performance on the search results of major search engines like Google and Bing. They plan to launch the new domain authority metric on the 5th March 2019. The announcement gives marketers some time to be prepared for the changes and make the necessary adjustments.
What is a Domain Authority?
Domain authority is a score invented by Moz; Some claim that it was designed to replace PageRank score after it was discontinued by Google. However, the metric is not connected with Google in any way. Domain authority has scored from 1 – 100. The higher the DA score, the better the site rank on the search engine result. It is used by SEO professionals to compare their clients’ sites with the competitors so that they know which keywords to target and how to fix the technical aspects of the client’s site so that it becomes more acceptable to the search engine algorithm.
What are the Changes in the New Moz DA?
The new model of the Moz DA will be able to understand better why small sites do not rank for keywords in the past. Moz said that the new model will switch from complex network to a neural network when calculating the ranking of a site. One of the benefits is that it enables them to more accurately detect link manipulation. Besides, Moz is also including a Spam Score metric in the domain authority. They are also rolling out a new Moz Link Explorer, which has a database of over 35 trillion links.
The Principle Research Scientist at Moz, Russ Jones said that the domain authority metric is meant to be used as a relative metric instead of an absolute metric. He pointed out that domain authority does not have any value at all if it is not used for comparing with other sites. It is no matter if the DA score drop or increase, but more importantly, it is when the DA score becomes lower or higher than your competitors. He advised that webmasters check the competitors’ scores too when Moz launch the update.
The changes that they are making will update the DA metric according to the latest happenings on the Google algorithm. Domain Authority 2.0 will be more sensitive to changes in the Google algorithm and scale along with it. It will give a clearer picture to the webmasters on the strengths of their sites. SEO companies that use Domain Authority to provide a report of the site progress will be affected by this change. Moz has already prepared a webinar to guide SEO professionals on how to adapt to the new changes.
Sarah Bird, the CEO of Moz, said that they put emphasis on being transparent to the users. Besides the webinar, they also posted a complete collection of resources on their site so that members can learn what the changes they are making. In this way, SEO professionals will know how to explain to their clients concerning the new changes.
Private Blog Network Will Be Devalued
Private Blog network will be affected by the new domain authority in some way. Russ Jones said that they will artificially cause the DA of the private blog network to drop if they block the Moz crawler. They will a inflict penalty on private blog network who sell links. If they allow Moz to crawl, they will implement special variables on sites that know how to control their backlinks.
It will also address all link spamming problem including link sellers/buyers, link on blog comments, link island, and other schemes that are based on link sale. A user on Twitter responded by saying that there are a lot of people see selling links as they see the opportunities to cheat newbies who don’t know much about how links help websites to rank. Lots of people decide to buy links from these guys but they later receive penalties from Google. The reason is that most of these links are on the spammed domain, which is contrary to what they advertise on the sales thread.
Is the DA Important?
Often, the DA is a distraction to newbies – newbies often try to get their websites to have high DA score. Even if you have a high DA score, it does not guarantee that you will rank high on the search engine. It was because people become obsessed and start to cheat that Google discontinued PageRank. PageRank still at least but you can no longer see a visible score in the toolbar. The removal of the visible PageRank score shows that they do not seem to support using domain authority as a metric. Google places more focus on the metric score that is not based on links.
Reference site: https://moz.com/blog/new-domain-authority
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