And Our Clients Have Done Pretty Well Out of It
On the 5th March 2019, Moz updated their Domain Authority algorithm to make it more accurate than ever before.
If you’re not aware, Moz’s Domain Authority is a score attributed to websites by Moz.com. In essence, it ranks a websites authority, using a number of ranking signals. For years it was considered to be the most accurate and relied upon metric in SEO, however much like the Google algorithm it became easily gamed and manipulated. Similarly like the Google algorithm, it has been updated to provide a more accurate reflection of a website’s authority and quality.
Tuesday 5th March and Wednesday 6th March saw a huge number of people panicking as their domain authority plummeted. This resulted in thousands of SEO’s taking to social networks posting updates such as:
Hashtags such as #DA_Down became popular on Twitter as SEOs and bloggers alike struggled to figure out what had happened. The average site online is said to have seen a 16% drop in domain authority with Moz's new calculations
At i3MEDIA, a few of us stayed glued to our laptops into the evening of the 5th March waiting for Moz 2.0 to drop, and we were more than pleasantly surprised to find that on large our client’s websites saw their domain authority increase with the updates:
After a quick review of sites across the web who have seen significant decreases, we have made three conclusions:
- Websites that sell links have been devalued
- Moz have caught up with websites manipulating the metric through bad link building (buying links on mass, targeting lots of low-quality links)
- Websites that have been building site quality and authority by working on creating technically sound sites, with high quality backlinks and highly valuable content have seen their Domain Authority increase
At i3MEDIA we don’t believe in quick wins, or short cuts to success – which is one reason we turn down 5 or more clients every month. Our work is about future proofing, building authority and increasing a websites visibility whilst ensuring that we are always on top of Google’s webmaster guidelines and protecting our client’s websites from any potential algorithm updates.
As such, we welcome Moz 2.0 as justification in our approach, not only do our clients see an increase in traffic and revenue but the world’s leading SEO metrics reflect the fact that the work we are doing is one with the direction Google wants sites to move in.
It’s important to remember that this update in Domain Authority will not result in websites increasing or decreasing in rankings, it’s simply an indicator of websites that are doing SEO right and those doing it wrong.