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SEOMoz offers a metric called 'domain authority' which appears to be based on 'trusted' sites like wiki, .gov domains, and the like which link to your site.

How seriously should this be taken and what practical steps can one take to build up domain authority beyond wiki entries and such.

Also is SEOMoz worth the price of entry or are there free alternatives?

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2 Answers

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I'm the founder of Moz, and figured I could jump in and provide some help.

Domain Authority is basically a mashup of all the metrics we calculate with our Linkscape web index. It's formulated in such a way as to provide the best overall correlation with a domain's ability to rank in Google's results (we do this by machine learning against a large training set each time we produce an index and finding this "best fit" algorithm). Thus, DA is hard to describe from a feature/input set, but what it means is fairly intuitive - given no other ranking factors (content, keywords, individual page metrics, etc), how well would a page on this site rank vs. a page on other sites?

Hope that helps! More info available here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-science-of-ranking-correlations and here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics

Cheers!

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are you really the founder of SEOMOZ? – Marco Demaio Apr 2 '12 at 16:13
1  
Yes, he is the founder. – John Conde♦ Apr 2 '12 at 17:14
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Well, probably more a co-founder, his mom Gillian Muessig founded the company. Still - great to see Rand here giving insider insights. – Mike Hudson Apr 2 '12 at 22:33
Thanks for this reply (have to say the site is a bit confusing for us here at MJW, particularly the crawl diagnostics), I think the biggest problem for us is that we were looking for practical advice on how to improve. – MJWadmin Apr 2 '12 at 22:42
up vote 3 down vote

Although SEO Moz is a very solid site for SEO advice and such, I'm a bit skeptical about a tool promising to asign a score to your site.

There are literally an infinite amount of variables which affect SEO today and as such it is impossible for a software program to emulate all the variables and spit out a simple score. Google even has recently begun punishing webmasters who overdo the SEO - so following the advice of these tools now actually might cause more harm (although in the past they were helpful for basic guidelining).

When it comes to SEO - the golden rule is to provide quality content and the links will come and so will the crawlers. If there is any hint of gaming the system or forcing the process, Google and the others will detect.

This page from Google actually should help point you in the right direction: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

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mat I ask where you read that Google begun punishing webmastres who overdo the SEO, and what does "overdoing SEO" mean? – Marco Demaio Apr 2 '12 at 16:15
what the hell, you are right, I read now here: searchengineland.com/… – Marco Demaio Apr 2 '12 at 16:35

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