When Google finally withdrew its Pagerank in April, 2016 webmasters, link brokers and SEOs across the globe lost a simple method to assess a website inbound links score and popularity. And because the energy conservation law works at its best, everybody wanted and expected smth to substitute the Pagerank toolbar. That is when most of us were hooked by DA (Domain Authority) and PA (Page Authority) introduced by MOZ, one of the most influential marketing analytics platform. Meanwhile, if you put “=” between Pagerank (and trustworthiness of the website in general) and Domain Authority – you are making the worst SEO mistake imaginable. And here is why: DA algorithms are just too simple to deliver the scoring worth relaying on. So one needs to clearly understand that this metric alone can’t and shouldn’t be of critical importance. However, when it comes to the analysis of a website you may be tempted to publish your hard-written article on, there are more things to check out than just its DA/PA.
Let’s consider a random example – the website http://www.id-software.com DA 35/100 PA 43/100:
Looks allright, isn’t it? A perfect website to mention your software website and give it a little bit extra of the link juice. Looks adequately priced at $80 for a sponsored post (information that the website sells links may be invalid – I did not get this offer from a corporate e-mail). But let’s have a look at the domain just a bit closer. Starting of course from its WebArchive history:
Year 2003
Year 2015
and our trust into the domain starts to fade. A good website would be true to its domain keyword topic through years – do these two snapshots have anything to do with the software? Obviously no.
Let’s check out another quick metric – anchors of the existing dofollow links:
Anchor texts of the inbound links
Do these involve terms related to software? Not really. Clearly, the website was used as a spam resource for “Nike air max” related queries and getting pushed in SERPs by gathering links from the trash sites like these:
Inbound links domains
There are 3 simple conclusions to make:
1. Do not over-rely on DA and PA and these metrics may be misleading
2. Do the human part of the analysis. Algorithms are fairly easy to trick
3. SEO is more time consuming than you might have expected
Thanks for reading and you are welcome to share!
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