case against Moz’s Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA), a score for search engine rankings developed by Moz, is supposed to predict how well a site will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

DA scores can range from 1 to 100. Higher scores are associated with a higher likelihood of achieving a higher ranking.

This is a metric that’s abused and misused by unsuspecting marketing professionals. It’s time to reconsider the role of Domain Authority in your SEO campaigns.

A metric for “an earlier, very distinct game”

Bill James, father of Sabermetrics (the advanced study of baseball statistics), has a problem with the “error” baseball metric.

It is the only major sports statistic that is an accurate record of what a spectator believes should have been achieved.

Michael Lewis, the author of “Moneyball,” described it in James’ words.

The error metric was created for “an earlier, very different game,” when “fielders did not wear gloves, and the outfield was left unmowed,” as well as “any ball that was hit beyond a few feet of a fielder who was on leave from Civil War, was unplayable.”

This is my biggest problem with Moz Domain Authority and any other metric like it. The metric was designed for “an earlier, very different game”, when the world required extensive lists of popular sites.

Why I am beating this dead horse

As I was writing this article I shared some early drafts with some of the most knowledgeable SEOs that I know.

Some responded with “It is all true, but why keep beating a dead horse?” Or “I believe everyone already knows that this metric has no value.”

I wish it were true.

A prospective client recently asked me about the notes I made in my RFP that said not to use Domain Authority as a key performance indicator.

The prospect responded, “That’s so logical; the SEO agency that we’re terminating kept reporting on DA increasing, but we didn’t see any other real KPIs increase in the organic channel.”

DemandJump’s marketing platform for content marketer, “The Death of Domain Authority,” was released just as I finished this article.

Hope is all that one can do.

Ryan Brock, Chief Solutions Officer at DemandJump presented data to show why Domain Authority is useless.

DemandJump can speak for itself, but it’s important to note that Domain Authority will still be a major part of the discussion in 2023.

The history of Moz Domain Authority and its calculation

In order to give some context to this story, as part of my research for the article, I researched the history of Domain Authority.

When you contact the company to get the “official line”, sometimes details are lost.

In my research I discovered that Moz’s Domain Authority (DA), which was released in 2006, was created by Rand Fishkin and his team of SEO specialists.

When we contacted Moz to confirm this, it seemed that the history had been lost. Ironically, Moz referred us to an article from Search Engine Land on the subject.

DA’s original goal was to be a more reliable and accurate way of measuring a site’s authority and impact than just looking at PageRank. PageRank is a similar metric created by Google.

Early on, Moz’s DA was based a combination of metrics like MozRank and MozTrust as well as factors such as the age of a domain, its size, and its quality.

In 2019, Moz released the second version, developed this time by Russ Jones.

With DA 2.0 Moz has retired MozRank, MozTrust, and started relying on their Link Explorer, a product that contains “over 35 trillion” links.

According to Moz

Domain Authority 2.0 is a neural-network model based on a variety of proprietary internal metrics – link counts, Spam score, and complex distributions – alongside more traditional inputs. Together, they estimate the quality and volume of traffic that a link may pass.”

In digging through this history, I discovered that Google and other search engines are rarely mentioned. Later, we’ll discuss this more.

Why Moz’s Domain Authority is flawed as a search engine metric

Reason 1: The domain level

The main problem I have always had with Domain Authority is that Google PageRank is designed to rank webpages and not domains.

The Alexa Rank is a metric that can be used to evaluate a website. It is owned by Amazon and calculated based on a variety of data sources including the browsing habits of users of the Alexa Toolbar.

Moz has calculated the authority metric from the beginning, even though Google has stated repeatedly that they do not look at authority at the level of the domain, meaning anything that relates to their linking algorithm PageRank.

Google and John Mueller can’t stress this enough.

I have a collection of screenshots that Mueller has taken telling people that DA does not align with anything Google. I use these in a class that I teach at UCLA on “SEO Mythology.”

Google has confirmed that it does look at certain signals at the domain level. But “authority”, i.e. link-based signals, is not among them.

When Gary Illyes was sitting on a Google panel in Sydney, Australia many years ago, someone asked about Domain Authority. Gary replied:

• We don’t use Page Authority at Google. Page Authority is a good idea but not the same as Moz’s.

You read it right. Page Authority is another “authority metric” that Moz uses.

Domain Authority is a similar concept to PageRank. It may not be the same, but it’s close.

After reading some of Jones’s older blog entries, I honestly think that the disconnect was a semantic issue. In a post entitled “In Defense of Domain Authority,” Jones wrote:

Domain level metrics are important if Google uses a model similar to the PageRank model. Here’s why. Most links on the internet are internal. Most links consist of one link pointing at another, where both are located on the same domain. The flow of value from links is therefore largely contained in these clusters around domains. External links that point to any domain page are more likely than external pages to pass on value to other internal pages. “While each external link to a specific page is not a domain metric in itself, the unavoidable result of this pattern is we form a similar phenomenon when simply following links throughout the web.”

Jones was not the first to say it, and I don’t think he will be the last. Especially after this article is published on the internet.

When I discuss Domain Authority with others, I often use some variation of “internal linking matters, and that is what I mean when I refer to ‘domain authority.'”

The problem is that Google says there is no such thing in their book as “domain authority”, so the issue becomes moot.

Dig deep: Don’t worry about Google SEO tool scores

Reason 2: It’s a weak correlative

(TL;DR ) – Moz’s Domain Authority does not strongly correlate statistically to Google rankings.

Be patient, this is a long walk.

Jen Hood, a statistician with whom I worked on a publication about the misuse by SEO tool companies of statistical “studies”, reviewed, ten years ago, a presentation given by Rob Ousbey during Mozcon 2019. The presentation covered Ousbey’s theory that results on the first page of search engine results pages are more driven by engagement with these pages than by links.

To learn more, Will Critchlow – founder and CEO at Distilled – offered me a study written by Tom Capper, a former Ousbey colleague, which provided a deeper look into the material Ousbey had presented in 2019.

Capper’s slide references a presentation he gave in February 2017 on whether Google needed links. It was also a Moz report, which was, I should note, five years old by 2017, so this is the original Domain Authority.

My interview with Hood about this issue:

• “This, [Capper] examines how Domain Authority and ranking relate,” referring the Moz metric which is the cornerstone for the tool’s reporting of inbound links. “He says that the correlation between Domain Authority and Google rankings is 0.001 for position 1 through 5, and 0.011 from 6 to 10.”

• Hood took a moment to clarify that I understood. “This means Domain Authority is highly correlated with the search engine rankings for positions 6-10, but both results show very weak correlations,” Hood said.

• For positions 1 to 5 of Google’s search results, Domain Authority is able to explain 0.1% variance in SERP rankings. It explains a 1.1% variance in SERP rankings for positions 6 to 10.

• This is used as proof that Domain Authority does not matter as much in top positions. The correlations between the two are so low that they’re almost meaningless.

Brock, during DemandJump’s recent webinar presented numerous examples of websites with high Domain Authorities whose contents ranked horribly compared with other websites with lower DA scores. ).

Jones was one of the first people to question the conclusions shortly after my interview was published. But I felt that he had proved his point by doing so.

• We know that there is no one ranking factor that will explain the entire algorithm. Jones said in his reply back in July 2020 that “weak correlations will be part of any complicated system.”

That’s what I am trying to say. We are dealing with a metric which correlates only weakly with the thing to which it was supposed to be correlated in the first instance, or does?

Domain Authority was not designed to mimic Google

Have you ever watched someone drive a nail with a screwdriver handle into a piece wood? It’s terrifying.

It could be because my grandfather used to grumble, “Right tool, right job, boy!”

This sort of thing makes me a bit sensitive. I have a second problem with Domain Authority. People use it for the wrong job.

Jones, the creators of Domain Authority 2.0 said that “Moz does not claim to have a metric that mimics Google.”

Why would anyone bother with Domain Authority, if it does not mimic Google?

According to Moz,

Domain Authority (DA) was developed by Moz to predict how well a site will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Hood says:

• “Moz claims that it has a metric that predicts, with a certain degree of accuracy, the likelihood of a site ranking based on only domain-level links metrics.”

As we have already established, Google does not look at the link-based authority of a domain, so we are back where we began.

Jones clarified, in a conversation on Twitter with Hood not long after we published our article about shoddy SEO analyses:

• “Moz doesn’t claim that Domain Authority established many causal relationships that led to a certain ranking on Google.”

Domain Authority is a big lie

James’s main complaint about the error metric used in modern baseball was that it is too easy to avoid. Lewis said:

• The easiest way to avoid making an error is to be too slow in reaching the ball.
• James wrote, “You must do something right in order to make an error.” Even if you are standing right where the ball was hit, you were in the right spot to begin with.
• Lewis went on to say that “the statistics were not just inadequate, they lied.”
• The lies they told caused the managers of major league baseball teams, who run their teams, to misjudge and mismanage the games.

Domain Authority is lying to its users.

I get it. To make life easier, people love to reduce things to “one number”.

Even in baseball, the players know that they must look at a variety of metrics to make decisions. But their dataset is nowhere near as large as Google’s.

You can imagine how long it took Fishkin to reach this moment of “I am death, the destroyer worlds”.

Who does DA really hurt?

DA is a way to measure a website’s authority and influence more accurately and reliably than by looking at PageRank alone.

Moz can claim that it is not their fault if people use their product to compare rankings in Google.

You don’t simply shrug it off and apologize, just as a company making weedkiller finds out that their product causes cancer. You remove that poison from the market.

Look, I get it. Here, they’re not prescribing Thalidomide or ignoring the dangers of smoking to pregnant women.

Moz still has a large portion of the SEO industry hooked onto a metric, believing that it is aligned with Google rankings. However, it has absolutely nothing to do with Google rankings.

Every day, the Domain Authority metric determines whether or not a company will survive. People panic when it drops and jobs can be lost as a result.

Domain Authority is the core metric of a micro-economy that focuses on buying and selling links and domains. Domain name reselling is a multibillion dollar industry.

Who knows how much money links are worth?

Domain Authority is often used as a KPI by companies who are only interested in improving their DA rather than providing a better user experience.

These same companies ignore the true KPIs for their business and instead focus on what is essentially a vanity metric.

Moz is an excellent company. I use it myself to teach SEO classes at UCLA. They could still stop this carnage by simply clarifying Domain Authority does not have anything to do with Google, or better yet, removing it entirely.

Moz might never remove this metric, but you can at least stop using it for your SEO reporting.

The first Search Engine Land post Moz Domain Authority was published.