Moz Domain Authority Upgrade : What Are New & Can This Impact Your Search Ranking?

Moz, the popular SEO toolset, announced domain authority updates. Domain authority is a metric Moz uses to determine how valuable a certain domain is and how it can rank in Google or other search engines.  According to Moz, the upgrade is meant to measure the strength of a site better than before, allowing for wedding out paid and spammy links designed to game the metric.

However it is important to note that Domain authority is not a Google score, and nor does the search engine use it to determine ranking. Furthermore, SEO companies think it causes confusion in the field.

Folks in SEO community are using this DA, as some call domain authority, as a substitute to Google’s own toolbar PageRank metric –which too had nothing to do with the ranking, and that is why Google killed it. But there is no connection between the domain authority and Google, and so it has no impact on rankings. Nor will it help to improve the search engine ranking.

What is domain authority?

Moz defines it as “a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages.” A Domain Authority is scored on a scale of 1 to 100. Sites with higher scores are hailed to have the better ability to rank.

As of March 5, Moz made some changes to the DA, which is as Moz says, is a proprietary Moz metric, and so search engines have nothing to do with that. They do not use it to determine rankings.

However, many in the industry use the domain authority to measure the strength of a domain relative to ranking. “We recognize that stability plays an important role in making Domain Authority valuable to our customers, so we wanted to make sure that the new Domain Authority brought meaningful changes to the table,” says Russ Jones, a principal search engine scientist at Moz. 

Changes introduced with the updates

Following are the technical changes behind the new Domain Authority and why they matter.

Training Set

According to Moz, the training domain authority is what it relies on against an unmanipulated, large set of search results. It believes doing some changes to training set will make the domain authority more valuable to users. The new domain authority is hailed better at understanding sites which don’t rank for any keywords at all than it has in the past.

Training Algorithm

This is an effort to reduce the dependency on the complex linear model. The new domain authority uses a neural network to detect link manipulation.

Model Factors

This change allows the domain authority to integrate Spam Score and complex distributions of links based on quality and traffic, along with a bevy of other factors.

Link Index

Moz has an index of 35 trillion links.  Moz calls link index the heart or backbone of the domain authority.

The new domain authority is believed to deliver a better, more trustworthy metric than ever before. “We can remove spam, improve correlations, and, most importantly, update Domain Authority relative to all the changes that Google makes,” says Rush Jones in a blog post.

Does this update affect your search ranking and what should you do?

Domain authority is not a Google metric; it is the metric used by Moz – a SEO tools provider. So there is nothing SEO folks or businesses should worry about as Barry Schwartz says “domain authority can be a distraction for SEOs. “Improving a DA score has no direct relationship to improving your rankings in Google.” Even Google PageRank metrics was just the distraction, and that is why Google stopped the visible score from being displayed to SEOs. 

So DA doesn’t influence your Google rankings.  It has zero impact on how your website ranks in search engine result pages. So if your DA score goes up or goes down, this does not mean your Google rankings will follow the same suite – it will go up or down.

However, there are lots of confusions in SEO community. Some ask Google how to improve their DA. Much of this confusion dates back to Google owns marketing hype around PageRank when Google made this score visible for any page in the browser with its Google tool bar explorer. 

Google stopped showing the page rank score in 2016, which forced the industry to look for another metric. And link building came out as a result. And this is, today, crucial part of SEO services.

You should use it as a relative metric to compare with other sites. It does not matter if your DA drops. What matters is whether it drops or increases relative to your competitors. 

Domain authority is a comparative metric, and should be used to compare domain score of a website with others. You should not stress this enough just because of the fear that it might impact your ranking.