Look around at most link building services and you’ll find that a huge majority of them rate the ‘quality’ of the domains they build links on by a single primary metric – Moz Domain Authority. In this post I’m going to show you why Moz DA is actually one of the worst indicators of actual domain quality and why you should never rely on it alone!
What is a quality domain?
There are many different ways to measure the quality of a domain, and our approach here at EN Backlinks is to use as many different ways to measure it as possible! A quality domain is a real website that not only has lots of high quality content, but gets a lot of real traffic from real people who are reading that content. Naturally, it will have plenty of backlinks from other domains, and many of those would also be from high quality domains. And let’s not forget of course that if a website is this good, it’s going to be ranking for a lot of keywords! After all, if it wasn’t ranking, then where would it be getting all the traffic and backlinks from?
Here’s an example:
The screenshot above shows the domain in question in the SEMRush tool. The authority score is incredibly high, the traffic and the backlinks are in the millions, the vast majority of that traffic comes from the US and it’s ranking for over a quarter of a million keywords. Pretty impressive.
The above image is the same domain shown in Majestic SEO which is the only tool out there that has a trust based metric and shows how relevant the domain is topically. Again, very good numbers all around.
Now I’ll also show you how this looks in Moz:
So first of all notice that the Domain Authority score here is even higher than the score that SEMRush gives it, yet the number of links and ranking keywords are showing considerably less. Why? Because SEMRush simply does a much better job at finding backlinks and ranking keywords than Moz! However, that’s not really the point of this post.
Moz makes BAD sites look good!
I’ve started off the post looking at an example of a really solid website so you can see what it looks like in various SEO tools. If a domain is genuinely a high quality domain, then it’s going to have good metrics across the board and will have high scores in any SEO tool.
However, Moz in particular, does a really poor job at looking at overall domain quality and it will very often give really high domain authority scores to domains that are actually quite terrible! Let me give you another example, this time in reverse…
This domain has a fantastic Moz DA score, and you’ll pay hundreds of dollars for that link in many places! But even this screen shows a glaring red flag – it ranks for precisely 0 keywords! So why on earth does Moz give it such a high domain authority score? Because their algorithm is horribly flawed and only takes into account the other domains that link to it. As you can see, it has a great many backlinks – probably from other similar sites!
The screenshot from Majestic gives you a much better idea of what is going on. Citation Flow is a measure of the number of backlinks pointing to a domain, and the Trust Flow is the measure of how trusted those links are. In a genuine good quality domain that we saw previously, the TF and CF values should be around the same level, which they are. Any Trust Flow less than 10 is a very low score, but when partnered with a high Citation Flow is even worse because it indicates that the vast majority of the backlinks that it has are of extremely low quality. And that’s exactly what SEMRush confirms:
Again, we see a very low Authority Score but we can also clearly see again that not only is the domain not ranking for any keywords but it has no traffic. This is a clear indication of a Google penalty. Looking at that massive traffic spike in February it looks like this domain was spammed to hell for a quick boost in traffic and was then quickly penalised and subsequently everything dropped to zero.
Links from domains like this one will actually hurt your rankings, and most definitely not help them!
Moz DA is very easy to manipulate
The algorithm that Moz use is much more simplistic than that of SEMRush, Ahrefs, Majestic and others. It basically looks at the DA of the backlinks and uses that to determine the DA of the target domain. Which means that if you obtain links from the site shown above, your website will almost certainly rise in domain authority, because Moz is currently scoring it at an impressive looking 76, but it will likely bring down the scores on other platforms!
This is how and why you see so many link building services out there that are using Moz DA in isolation as their ‘quality’ metric. It’s so easy to fool! You buy links like these for a few bucks on sites like Fiverr. This then perpetuates the problem, because the ease of manipulating DA means that it is easy for spammers to mass produce large networks of websites all linking to each other and artifically inflating the DA whilst having auto-generated content, but absolutely no rankings or traffic! But they’ll then sell links on these sites at ridiculous prices!