Moz DA spam hack - how it works?

Question

I've seen couple websites that has High DA (50+) but when I analyze them on ahrefs it shows LOW DR and some links form google redirects from all domain extensions that belong to google.

I do understand that this is spammy websites, and those links are mostly will be counted as SPAM. This is done only to manipulate Moz DA.

But what I can not understand how do these people create this kind of redirect links from google. This is kind of a puzzle that I want to solve and understand how it works.

Please see redirect link example and ahrefs screenshots

Answer 1

First of all, MOZ is a completely inadequate tool for SEO analysis. Same goes for SEMRush and many-many others that are considered to be very reputable.

If you look closer at their data, you will be shocked to find out that it's sometimes five years old despite of what it looks like.

Ahrefs, however, is one of the most accurate tools.

Therefore, when you see MOZ data, keep in mind that it's extremely inaccurate.

Now, the whole notion of DR/DA has never meant much. People keep misunderstanding what it means due to severe lack of technical knowledge. So-called domain authority should be treated as maximum authority a backlink can physically pass from that domain. A maximum. That maximum is achieved when your backlink is on the home page. For five years. In an H1. Takes 25% of the screen space. There. If you get the link from the home page (or extremely close to it, crawling-wise), then you care about DA/DR. Otherwise, it's a vanity metric pretty much. Links on the screenshot are a great example of utterly useless links from a very reputable DR.

Now about Ahrefs' 301s in the report. It means nothing important in this case. It only means that the link that google uses is being redirected to the www version. Nothing to worry about.

Now why DR and DA can be so different. Ahrefs' DR has a lot higher accuracy than anything else out there. Nobody does the heavy lifting Ahrefs does. Everyone else is either pretending or buying a little bit of ahref's data once in a while and do sampled analysis on that, forgetting to explain their users that data they operate is heavily sampled and outdated.

Finally... Ah, right. How they create links from google services. Easy. They just use google maps, google images, google blogs, google whatever. The links are worthless despite high DA/DR and/or domain traffic. You can buy a bunch of them for like $5 on pretty much any freelance site.

Many years ago people paid attention to page authority rather than domain authority. But page authority is a lot harder to achieve. It's much more expensive to buy. $5 can get you hundreds of high DA low PA links like on the screenshot. $50 may get you one mid PA link if you're lucky. Maybe that link even won't get removed in a month.

Answer 2

After many days of research and experiments I finally got the clue how some "SEOs" increase MOZ DA in 2 weeks.

So what do they do: Creating a page on indexable page on any indexable website. And they put tons of google redirect links on that page (or may be on many pages not the point).

Here is an example https://maps.google.de/url?sa=t&url=https%3A%2F%2FexampleSpam.com/

Moz indexes that page follows those links and getting to google redirect page where you can see the link to the target website.

So MOZ thinks that google redirect page is an autopunitive website that giving link to your target website.

It is like a snake eating himself ))

This is a stupid bug in MOZ algorithm that gives an opportunity to many frauduleuse to earn money on freelance websites.