In this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday, we're delighted to welcome Cyrus Shepard as he explains both what's new with the new Domain Authority 2.0 update, and how to best harness its power for your own SEO success. What is Domain Authority? A Domain Authority is a metric, from 1 to 100, which predicts how well a domain will rank in Google. Now Google may use some domain-like metrics based on links similar to Domain Authority, but they do not use Domain Authority itself. So if it's not a ranking factor, if Google doesn't use it, what does Domain Authority actually do? What's New With Domain Authority 2.0? That's a lot of links, and that's how many links are in the index that the new Domain Authority is based upon. So never use Domain Authority by itself. Having a DA 50 doesn't really tell you much unless you're comparing it to other DA scores. If you're building links for a client and you want to show progress, a common way of doing this is showing Domain Authority, meaning that we built these links for you and now your potential to rank is higher.
Domain Authority is an incredibly well-known metric throughout the SEO industry, but what exactly is the right way to use it? In this week’s edition of Whiteboard Friday, we’re delighted to welcome Cyrus Shepard as he explains both what’s new with the new Domain Authority 2.0 update, and how to best harness its power for your own SEO success.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, SEO fans. Welcome to a very special edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard. I’m honored to be here today with Moz to talk about the new Domain Authority. I want to talk about how to use Domain Authority to do actual SEO.
What is Domain Authority?
Let’s start with a definition of what Domain Authority actually is because there’s a lot of confusion out there. A Domain Authority is a metric, from 1 to 100, which predicts how well a domain will rank in Google. Now let’s break that down a little bit and talk about some of the myths of Domain Authority.
Is Domain Authority a ranking factor? No, Domain Authority is not a ranking factor. Does Google use Domain Authority in its algorithm? No, Google does not use Domain Authority in its algorithm. Now Google may use some domain-like metrics based on links similar to Domain Authority, but they do not use Domain Authority itself. In fact, it’s best if you don’t bring it up with them. They don’t tend to like that very much.
So if it’s not a ranking factor, if Google doesn’t use it, what does Domain Authority actually do? It does one thing very, very well. It predicts rankings. That’s what it was built to do. That’s what it was designed to do, and it does that job very, very well. And because of that, we can use it for SEO in a lot of different ways. So Domain Authority has been around since 2010, about 8 years now, and since then it’s become a very popular metric, used and abused in different ways.
What’s New With Domain Authority 2.0?
So what’s new about the new Domain Authority that makes it so great and less likely to be abused and gives it so many more uses? Before I go into this, a big shout-out to two of the guys who helped develop this — Russ Jones and Neil Martinsen-Burrell — and many other smart people at Moz. Some of our search scientists did a tremendous job of updating this metric for 2019.
1. Bigger Link Index
So the first thing is the new Domain Authority is based on a new, bigger link index, and that is Link Explorer, which was released last year. It contains 35 trillion links. There are different ways of judging index sizes, but that is one of the biggest or if not the biggest link indexes publicly available that we know of.
Thirty-five trillion links, to give you an idea of how big that is, if you were to count one link per second, you would be counting for 1.1 million years. That’s a lot of links, and that’s how many links are in the index that the new Domain Authority is based upon. Second of all, it uses a new machine learning model. Now part of Domain Authority looks at Google rankings and uses machine learning to try to fit the model in to predict how those rankings are stacked.
2. New Machine Learning Model
Now the new Domain Authority not only looks at what’s winning in Google search, but it’s also looking at what’s not ranking in Google search. The old model used to just look at the winners. This makes it much more accurate at determining where you might fall or where any domain or URL might fall within that prediction.
3. Spam Score Incorporation
Next the new Domain Authority incorporates spam detection.
Spam Score is a proprietary Moz metric that looks at a bunch of on-page factors, and those have been incorporated into the new metric, which makes it much more reliable.
4. Detects Link Manipulation
It also, and this is very important, the new Domain Authority detects link manipulation. This is people that are buying and selling links, PBNs, things like that.
It’s much better. In fact, Russ Jones, in a recent webinar, said that link buyers with the new Domain Authority will drop an average of 11 points. So the new Domain Authority is much better at rooting out this link manipulation, just like Google is attempting to do. So it much more closely resembles…
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