I am not surprised, as you probably could tell when I wrote about my issues with Moz’s domain authority a month ago. Moz updated their DA (domain authority) scores and some SEOs are freaking out that their Google rankings will drop.
DA and Google rankings have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Just because your DA score dropped, it does not mean in any way at all that your Google rankings will drop.
I don’t mind having link metrics – hey tons of tools have them. But for some reason, the way Moz has been marketing it, SEOs took on to DA as a Google internal metric. Moz has said numerous times that it is not a Google metric but people don’t read. So I am not sure who to blame but the situation just makes me sad.
I cannot tell you how many emails and social media mentions I got about people’s DA scores going down and asking me or Google how they can improve their score and thus their Google rankings. Here are just a few:
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 6, 2019
why does that matter at all?
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) March 5, 2019
I’m sorry, I can’t help with that. @rjonesx posted some links that probably give more insight than I could. pic.twitter.com/bNN43tPhue
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 6, 2019
A Black Hat World thread has someone saying “The moz 2.0 update is live. Almost all of my website’s are hit really hard. What do you think I can do to recover?” Recover from what exactly?
Something needs to be done and I think Moz agrees:
Just saying, this is what I am talking about… You guys at Moz need to be clearer about DA has zero to do with Google’s internal systems.
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) March 6, 2019
Thanks. I’m most interested in correcting the confusion because it causes people to misuse the metric, which in turn upsets SEO’s who are dealing with customers who make demands based on DA
— Russ Jones (@rjonesx) March 6, 2019
Making recommendations for what could have been is always easier :). Scores/metrics can be useful for various things, and TBH even when the metrics confuse some folks, of all the things that SEO tools companies do, it’s kinda low on my list of things I worry about.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 6, 2019
Sorry for being a bit too vocal about this. But, having been one of the persons that vouched to discontinue the public toolbar PageRank, I might be a bit over-sensitive to vanity metrics
— Pedro Dias (@pedrodias) March 6, 2019
But what? Maybe a big red flashing disclaimer?
Put a disclaimer right below the metric on your dashboards
— Pedro Dias (@pedrodias) March 6, 2019
All in all, I suspect the Moz marketing team is smiling now?
If you listen quietly you can hear the sound of thousands of link purchase spreadsheets being updated. Congratulations to @moz for the insane coverage and quality with the new DA.
— JR Oakes 🍺 (@jroakes) March 6, 2019
Forum discussion at Black Hat World and all the tweets above.
Update from Moz:
The tool tip should lead to the “What is Domain Authority” page, and that page should explicitly say “Google does not use DA as a ranking factor”. I have put in the request.
— Russ Jones (@rjonesx) March 6, 2019