We are blocking bots, crawlers, spiders and scan tools in our servers. Can this affect DA (domain authority)?

Question

I didn't know the concept of domain/page authority in SEO until 1 hour ago. We have been blocking bots, crawlers, spiders and scanners in general directly from Apache through ModSecurity rules (custom rules).

We are only allowing bots from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other third party tools, but we block automated tools, risky countries (like Rusia, China, Ukraine, etc.), risky IPs and others since we've had negative traffic experiences and attacks in the past. Everything works fine now, but I'm afraid this can affect how some tools measures DA to all the domains we are hosting.

So, blocking bots affects DA results, like the ones in this page? https://websiteseochecker.com/bulk-check-page-authority/

Thank you.

Answer 1

DA (domain authority) is a metric used by a company named Moz to measure a domain strenght relative to others.

Your DA won't be affected because it's computed from the sites that link to you.

However your PA (page authority) might be slightly affected if you block their bot, because they won't be able to compute how your internal link structure works.

That being said, it doesn't matter from a traffic perspective. Google, Bing and other search engines don't use that metric at all, they all have their own algorithms and don't rely on Moz or any other company's SEO metrics.