Domain Authority 2.0 Announced

Moz has announced that on March 5th, the search engine ranking score known as Domain Authority will be updated to Domain Authority 2.0.

Domain Authority, along with Google’s Pagerank, is used by webmasters across the globe to measure their comparative success against competitors in the endless quest for higher search engine rankings. The stated intention is for its ranking ability to keep match with updates search engine algorithms. Applying machine-learning, the new ranking will incorporate review of backlinks on a daily basis rather than the previous 30-day update. This allows for a more real-time scoring for you and your competitors.

This also appears to be an adjustment, or punishment for some, for those that create massive backlink farms to falsely increase their respective domain’s popularity. The new ranking will adjust for spam score, which could drastically reduce credibility for sites with a majority of their links coming from websites with high spam scores.

The announcement and accompanying documentation show that Moz is setting itself up in a prepared defensive position against the inevitable onslaught of complaints about a drop in score. This assessment favors that most Domain Authority scores are going to drop.

Moz Recommendations:

• Use DA as a comparative metric between sites of a similar caliber, category, or industry.
• Don’t look at your site’s Domain Authority score in isolation. Compare both yours and your competitor’s scores fluctuation after updates.
• Don’t mistake the 0–100 scale for an F–A grading on a test. Rather, you should be aiming for a score that is higher than your direct competitors.
• Expect regular fluctuations in your DA score, as both your site’s link profile and the rest of the web change over time.
• Don’t mistake DA for PageRank, Google’s link-based ranking signal. DA was created by Moz. Google doesn’t factor the score into your site’s ranking.