Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey John,

Some issues arose around Spam networks and Tumblr sites skewing the distribution. Over the last 12 months, these two types of sites outperformed (i.e., gained links and linking plds faster) most 'real' sites. This caused sites outside of these to appear to be trending down in DA, relative to the performance of those other networks. This makes sense, because this is precisely what spam networks are designed to do so, and tumblr.com is currently treated as a TLD, so it's easy for tumblr blogs to gain large numbers of linking PLDs (because they're free to create and link heavily to one another).

We do need to get this normalization work added to the index, but we need to do so in a way that does not allow these types of networks to have too much sway in the distribution. We will ensure that the communication of that change is clear and easy to communicate to other stakeholders for users.

Hi Dawn,

I want to bring your attention to an update I just added to this post. It seems there were some unexpected issues with the index update we released yesterday and scores should not have been affected as dramatically as they were. You were right to question and I am very sorry for the shock.

We will ensure that we are able to satisfy the needs of users before we look to remove any tool. Really appreciate all of the info shared in this thread and in the survey. The voice of you, the customer, is what really matters to us at Moz.

Hey Rick,

It should be back in the navigation. Please let me know if you are not seeing it there.

Hey Gregory,

For 1, we are really close on our work to pass links via redirect. Once we have that work complete you will see those links automatically passed to the current page.

For 2, in our customer research phase of this project some folks wanted to see this type of comparison. We wanted to share as much data as we could in that table. This could provide some insight into how much content that site is looking to get indexed, or show that the site is not quite technically optimized.

If you could send your site to [email protected], I would be happy to take a look and talk to my team about BOTW.

Across the board there was been a shift in DA as we index more of the web. We are finding more links to all sites, but the relative number we find to those mid range DA sites is fewer than what we are finding to sites like BBC and NYTimes.

This normalizing of DA scores ensures that scores don't continue to climb just because our index size increases. Rather DA should climb when we find more new links to a specific site over others.

We are also very close on our Links via Redirect work, so some of these sites will see a nice bump in link counts once we are able to pass that equity from the redirects they have.

UPDATE:

Yesterday's (June 4, 2018) adjustment to our DA/PA metrics turned out to have some unanticipated adverse effects. We're rolling back the adjustment, so by midday tomorrow you should see your scores return to what they were earlier this week. We're also implementing some new procedural checks on our end to help make sure it doesn't happen again. We sincerely apologize for any stress or burden this may have caused.

We also want to emphasize that DA and PA are relative metrics. The scores will fluctuate slightly with the index, and for that reason, should be used to compare your site with others. We realize this isn't always easy to explain to clients and stakeholders, so we're working on ways to help you all report these metrics in ways that minimize the potential for confusion.

******

We are continuing to improve our Domain Authority and Page Authority algorithms and strengthen our link index.

As of today, June 14, 2018, You may notice a slight variation in current and historic DA/PA scores in Link Explorer and tools that incorporate our new link data such as Campaigns, Keyword Explorer, and MozBar. This is due to a planned adjustment on our end that could be more noticeable than our standard updates. We made this adjustment in order to account for the rapid growth of our link index over the past 6 months and and stabilize distribution of scores over time.

For customers who have been tracking DA scores over time, you may want to make note of this adjustment date in your reporting.

Rest assured that our DA and PA scores are still far more stable and accurate than they were previously in Open Site Explorer. Our index is now 20 times larger (and growing) and updating daily rather than monthly, therefore standard fluctuations in the index are far less noticeable in your score than before.

DA and PA will still always fluctuate slightly and naturally with the index. As the landscape of the internet changes, so should our index to reflect those changes. Whenever we make an update on our end that could be noticeable on your end, we will let you know.

Also, please remember that DA and PA scores should always be understood as relative to other sites’ scores in the index, and reported to clients in relation to their competition and not as a standalone metric of individual performance.

If you have more questions about DA or the difference between the new score in Link Explorer vs. the old score in OSE, please read this FAQ page, or post a question below and I or a Mozzer will reach out.

Thank you!

Ian

I cannot speak to the count of inbound links that Google Webmaster Tools is reporting, but they are reporting far less than Moz and the other third party link indexing services. Without being able to dig into the link in your Webmaster account it is tough to say for sure, but within our index and others I am seeing a lot of follow links from site like Tumblr, Wordpress and Blogspot so there is a chance that Google is counting only one link where we treat each Tumblr or Blogspot subdomain as a domain and a link from that domain.

Hey everyone!

As the Update of this post states, we have decided to not retire Rank Tracker until we can fully support the functionality it provides to you and your workflows.

Really do appreciate all of the feedback and we are hopeful you will provide a bit more in the Rank Tracker survey. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any other questions or concerns.

Hey Moz Community,

Link Explorer is now open to the public! Everyone can access it via a subscription or a free Moz ‘Community’ account.

As you may know by now, the brand-new Link Explorer tool is primed to replace Open Site Explorer as Moz’s link building and analysis tool. The Link Explorer project is the result of an incredible amount of perseverance and hard work by the team, and we’re proud to be able to finally share it with you — we know it’s going to revolutionize how you approach link building and make your job easier.

You can read more about the tool here in Sarah Bird’s announcement post.

Because Link Explorer improves on almost every aspect of Open Site Explorer, the metrics have improved, too. That means you’re likely going to see some Domain Authority and Page Authority discrepancies between OSE’s index and Link Explorer’s index. We definitely suggest you use the new DA/PA from Link Explorer, as they’re more accurate and refresh daily rather than monthly, as was the case with OSE’s index. However, we also realize that many of you use these metrics to report to your clients and colleagues, and a sudden change or fluctuation could potentially make your job harder.

Which DA is the real DA?

The new DA is based on a much larger index that has many improvements, several of which are designed to make the index more like Google’s than ever before. You should consider moving towards the new DA (and the old DA won’t be updated after April 26th 2018, so the sooner the better). While there will be fluctuations as we improve the model and add features to the index, we expect it to remain largely stable and to be a far more accurate picture of a site’s authority according to how it’s seen by Google.

Why is Link Explorer’s DA/PA considered better than OSE’s, and which should I trust?

The larger link index with improved crawl selection allows us to produce a stronger model that includes a much larger proportion of the web. That being said, DA and PA should always be considered in the context of your competitors. A drop in PA or DA relative to the old OSE is of little concern if your competitors saw similar movement.

Is Domain Authority/Page Authority an absolute score or a relative one?

Both DA and PA are relative to the Internet as a whole. If Facebook acquired a billion new links, everyone’s PA and DA would drop relative to Facebook. Because of this, it’s always best to look at PA and DA in comparison to your competitors.

What does a drop/raise in DA mean in Link Explorer vs OSE? How can I explain this to my clients when I’m reporting it?

DA and PA should always be considered in the context of your competitors. A drop or raise in PA or DA relative to the old OSE is of little concern if your competitors saw similar movement. Reporting that your site has moved from a DA of 45 to a DA of 42 doesn’t tell the whole story, but reporting that your site has a DA of 42 while your main competitor moved from a 43 to a 37 shows that, relative to the sites you’re competing against in the SERPs, your site has significantly more authority and ranking power.

What’s happening to MozTrust and MozRank and why, and what should I replace those with?

The improvements to our DA/PA and Spam Score metrics now now account for more important nuances in helping you determine one site’s ability to rank higher than another. Because they no longer correlate with Google’s ranking model as well as they used to, MozRank and MozTrust are being deprecated for better metrics. Users should rely on Page Authority, Domain Authority, and Spam Score to determine the importance and quality of pages, domains, and links.

I have historical data I use to help my clients benchmark their progress. What do I do now that DA is calculated differently?

You should annotate any KPI changes referencing the change in DA and PA. However, most importantly, you should compare those changes to your competitors, as this will best show how strong your site’s authority is relative to the sites you’re competing against in the SERPs.

We take updating our metrics very seriously, and our last major update to the model was 7 years ago. Users of Domain Authority and Page Authority can expect us to continue to produce steady, reliable metrics for the long haul, and only make changes to these metrics when we believe the benefits dramatically outweigh the stability of the metric.

Do you have any questions about the new metrics? Anticipating a tough time reporting changes to clients or bosses? Metrics, features or functionality missing that you would want to see? Let us know in the thread, and we’ll work to find a good answer for you.

Hope you enjoy the new Link Explorer product and the amazing new link index powering it. We are very excited to provide this valuable data to our community and customers.

Don’t adjust your monitors, or think this is an elaborate April Fool’s joke, we are actually releasing our April Index Update EARLY! We had planned to release our April Index Update on the 6th, but processing went incredibly smoothly and left us the ability to get it up today.

Let’s dig into the details of the April Index Release:

• 138,919,156,028 (139 billion) URLs.

• 746,834,537 (747 million) subdomains.

• 190,170,132 (190 million) root domains.

• 1,116,945,451,603 (1.1 Trillion) links.

• Followed vs nofollowed links

• 3.02% of all links found were nofollowed

• 61.79% of nofollowed links are internal

• 38.21% are external

• Rel canonical: 28.14% of all pages employ the rel=canonical tag

• The average page has 90 links on it

• 73 internal links on average.

• 17 external links on average.

Don’t let me hold you up, go dive into the data!

PS - For any questions about DA/PA fluctuations (or non-fluctuations) check out this Q&A thread from Rand:https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Hey everyone!

As the Update of this post states, we have decided to not retire Rank Tracker until we can fully support the functionality it provides to you and your workflows.

Really do appreciate all of the feedback and we are hopeful you will provide a bit more in the Rank Tracker survey. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any other questions or concerns.

We are excited to announce that our March 2^nd Index Update is complete and it is looking great! We grew the number of subdomains and root domains indexed, and our correlations are looking solid across the board. Run, don’t walk, to your nearest computer and check out the sweet new data!

Here is a look at the finer details:

• 141,626,596,068 (141 billion) URLs

• 1,685,594,701 (1 billion) subdomains

• 193,444,117 (193 million) root domains

• 1,124,641,982,250 (1.1 Trillion) links

• Followed vs nofollowed links

• 3.09% of all links found were nofollowed

• 62.41% of nofollowed links are internal

• 37.59% are external

• Rel canonical: 27.46% of all pages employ the rel=canonical tag

• The average page has 92 links on it

• 74 internal links on average

• 18 external links on average

Thanks again!

PS - For any questions about DA/PA fluctuations (or non-fluctuations) check out this Q&A thread from Rand:https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Happy to announce to you all that our new Mozscape Index is fully live. We were so excited to beat our target date two months in a row and deliver the update early. Unfortunately, we ran into some minor crawl hang-ups towards the end and a now-identified upload issue -- that being said we are still very pleased with this most recent index, albeit being a day or so late.

The December release has nearly 181 billion URLs, 5.5 billion subdomains and just over 1.25 trillion links*. Best of all, the crawl issues of previous months appear to be a dust in the wind and we are looking solid as ever on the backend.

We hope the work we are doing helps better reflect the hard work you all are putting in to grow your clients and your own websites. Looking forward to another successful release a month from now!

Happy Holidays!

*More in-depth details on the index can be found here: December 15, 2015 Index Update

**If you have seen any  Domain Authority and Page Authority drops since the index release, please see Rand's post on DA/PA fluctuation for more

With the changes coming to our Free Mozscape access, and many of you asking for a lower priced API tier, we will now be offering an Entry Level plan. This plan will be priced at $250 per month for 120,000 rows of data, and $20 per 10,000 rows of overage. Here are some more details:

Entry Level Mozscape API Access
$250 - Per month
Overages:
$20 per additional 10,000 rows
Included Calls:
URL Metrics
Links
Top Pages
Anchor Text
Rows per Month:
120,000
Rate Limit:
200 requests per second

The new Entry Level plan is not yet up on our Pricing Page, however if you are interested, reach out to me directly and I can help you get set up.

Ian Watson - [email protected]

UPDATE:

Yesterday's (June 4, 2018) adjustment to our DA/PA metrics turned out to have some unanticipated adverse effects. We're rolling back the adjustment, so by midday tomorrow you should see your scores return to what they were earlier this week. We're also implementing some new procedural checks on our end to help make sure it doesn't happen again. We sincerely apologize for any stress or burden this may have caused.

We also want to emphasize that DA and PA are relative metrics. The scores will fluctuate slightly with the index, and for that reason, should be used to compare your site with others. We realize this isn't always easy to explain to clients and stakeholders, so we're working on ways to help you all report these metrics in ways that minimize the potential for confusion.

******

We are continuing to improve our Domain Authority and Page Authority algorithms and strengthen our link index.

As of today, June 14, 2018, You may notice a slight variation in current and historic DA/PA scores in Link Explorer and tools that incorporate our new link data such as Campaigns, Keyword Explorer, and MozBar. This is due to a planned adjustment on our end that could be more noticeable than our standard updates. We made this adjustment in order to account for the rapid growth of our link index over the past 6 months and and stabilize distribution of scores over time.

For customers who have been tracking DA scores over time, you may want to make note of this adjustment date in your reporting.

Rest assured that our DA and PA scores are still far more stable and accurate than they were previously in Open Site Explorer. Our index is now 20 times larger (and growing) and updating daily rather than monthly, therefore standard fluctuations in the index are far less noticeable in your score than before.

DA and PA will still always fluctuate slightly and naturally with the index. As the landscape of the internet changes, so should our index to reflect those changes. Whenever we make an update on our end that could be noticeable on your end, we will let you know.

Also, please remember that DA and PA scores should always be understood as relative to other sites’ scores in the index, and reported to clients in relation to their competition and not as a standalone metric of individual performance.

If you have more questions about DA or the difference between the new score in Link Explorer vs. the old score in OSE, please read this FAQ page, or post a question below and I or a Mozzer will reach out.

Thank you!

Ian

Happy Index Release Day!

For the second month in a row, our hard-working, supremely dedicated Big Data team has delivered our Index Update EARLY! Beyond being punctual, the May Index is one of our most comprehensive and largest update of the year for Moz.

Let’s dig into the details:

• 162,225,495,455 (162 billion) URLs.

• 1,135,327,420 (1.1 billion) subdomains.

• 194,346,505 (194 million) root domains.

• 1,168,465,575,815 (1.1 Trillion) links.

• Followed vs nofollowed links

• 2.84% of all links found were nofollowed

• 65.80% of nofollowed links are internal

• 34.20% are external

• Rel canonical: 28.89% of all pages employ the rel=canonical tag

• The average page has 92 links on it

• 76 internal links on average.

• 16 external links on average..

Go have fun with your new data!

PS - For any questions about DA/PA fluctuations (or non-fluctuations) check out this Q&A thread from Rand: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Sorry for any confusion here. The Spam Score in the new Links v2 and Link Explorer reports is quite a bit different than the previous version of Spam Score.

A Spam Score of 28% means that 28% of sites with similar features to yours have been penalized by Google. This does not mean that your site is spammy and if you have not had any penalties I would not be concerned about that score. It is best used to judge the quality of inbound links to your site, giving you a signal to help you determine which of those links needs some further investigation for possible removal.

Happy to answer any other questions about the new tool or the score - [email protected]

Very happy to hear that!

Is there anything missing on this page that you would like to see when you are doing this type of comparison?