Domain authority is a metric by Moz to show how strong your site is compared to other sites in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). It predicts the ranking ability of a website.
It has become the industry standard for measuring the strength of a domain relative to ranking. Moz announced an update that is coming to DA on March 5, 2019. Here is all you need to know about Domain Authority 2.0.
What’s changing in DA?
There are dozens of factors that are considered while calculating DA, with these changes there will be a number of additional factors that are considered in the Moz algorithm to determine the strength of a site.
- The training set and algorithm: Will be better at understanding sites which don’t rank for any keywords at all. Also been switched to a neural network that can detect link manipulation, rather than relying on a complex linear model.
- The model factors: A number of new factors will be introduced, including Spam Score (likelihood of being deindexed or penalized based on on-site metrics, doesn’t detect link spam) and link pattern identification. Previous ranking factors have also been improved.
- The backbone: Updates to the index, with over 35 trillion links.
In April 2018, Moz announced a rebuild to their link index, making it 35 times bigger and 30 times fresher. In March 2019, they will be changing the way DA is calculated and adding new ranking factors.
They will be able to devalue link sellers, link buyers, comment spam, link islands, links from untrafficked sites and other link schemes.
Moz aim to deliver a more accurate and trustworthy metric with Domain Authority 2.0 to bring better predictions of search performance.
You may see changes to your Domain Authority come March 5, but they believe the fluctuations will be minimum.
Don’t forget, DA is a relative comparative metric…
As mentioned in my previous post, How to improve your DA, your domain authority is relative to the Moz index and the sites contained in that index.
The score is meaningless unless compared to other sites. So it doesn’t matter if your DA increases or decreases, what matters is whether it increases or decreases compared to to your competitors or sites similar to yours.
Also worth keeping in mind that Google has stated that they do not use Domain Authority in their search algorithms.
You shouldn’t think of DA as a grade. Instead of aiming for a DA of 100, you should be aiming for a score that is higher than similar sites that appear in search results for your target keywords. Increasing your Domain Authority is an indication that your site will perform better in search results.
One response to “Moz is updating Domain Authority, here’s what is changing…”
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