Moz, the well-known SEO toolset has announced a new upgrade on the way it measures an internal metric which it calls “Domain Authority”. Domain Authority is a score which calculates a domain’s value based on its ranking on major search results such as Google and Bing. The higher the score, the greater is a website’s ability to achieve a higher SERP ranking. As per Moz, the upgrade, which will be launched on March 5, is meant to ensure a more reliable measurement by removing paid and spammy links efficiently.
Google doesn’t use Domain Authority as a factor in search ranking. But ever since Google did away with its visible PageRank scores, some SEO professionals have made use of Domain Authority as an alternative to the PageRank metric though the Moz metric isn’t connected with the former in any way.
Russ Jones, the Principal Search Scientist at Moz explained how they have made quite a few technical changes for calculating Domain Authority.
What are the new changes?
The training set
The new domain authority can understand factors which reveal why specific sites didn’t rank for any keywords in the past in a better way.
The training algorithm
Instead of being dependent on a complicated linear model, Moz has opted for a neutral network. So provides a more effective model for catching link manipulation.
The model factors
When it comes to model factors, apart from looking at link counts, Moz has integrated its Spam Score and complicated distribution of links based on quality and traffic.
Index
At present, Moz has an index of 35 trillion links.
What does this signify?
The company believes that the fundamental enhancements to Domain Authority will deliver a more reliable metric. Now Moz can remove spam, enhance correlations and update Domain Authority with respect to all changes which are made by Google.
What do you need to do?
Ensure that you use a domain authority as a relative metric. Domain Authority is useless if it isn’t compared with other sites. What matters the most isn’t whether your website falls or rises in rankings. What matters is whether it drops or rises in comparison to your competitors. Once the new Domain Authority is rolled out, ensure that you check your own scores along with that of your competitors since they are likely to vary in a similar direction.
Have a clear idea of how to communicate the changes to co-workers, clients and stakeholders
Be ready to communicate with clients about the new changes and enhancements related to domain authority. Though changes are always troublesome, the new Domain Authority is far better and will enable Moz to take wise decisions related to SEO strategies in the days to come.
Expect domain authority to compete with Google
Moz expects that as in the case of Google which makes numerous changes to their algorithm each year, it will make domain authority far more responsive to changes made by Google. So even when there is a major algorithm update like Panda or Penguin from Google, you can be assured that Moz’s Domain Authority stays relevant and useful.
