SEOmoz – Page & Domain Authority
SEOmoz launched Open Site Explorer last week, it has been a resounding success. With rumours moving around SEO circles that Yahoo’s Site Explorer will be no more once Bing takes over Yahoo (already team has decreased from 12 to 3 people in the last year), SEO’ers have been worried of not having a successor to Yahoo. Fortunately SEOmoz has filled the gap and have raised the benchmark by doing so.
Will Critchlow interviews Rand Fishkin to get an understanding of how SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer operates.
In Part One, Will and Rand discuss how to use these metrics to gain insight and intelligence on your (and your competitors’) pages, domains, and link profiles, as well as why these metrics can be a better predictor of ranking success than others that you may have used in the past.
In Part Two, the guys dive into detail about what exactly goes into Domain Authority & Page Authority: how they were modeled, how they compare to actual search results, why your DA & PA scores may change over time, and lots of other details to help you better understand how these metrics work.
I’ve summarised Part 2:
Open Site Explorer is based on Google.com’s algorithm, Bing is becoming more and more like Google so SEOmoz’s algorithm for Open Site Explorer is 70% correct. They are obviously constantly trying to perfect this but so is Google and Bing. The ultimate goal is to make it more human like..
The algorithm measures the following:
- On page optimisation
- Social graph
- Usage traffic
- Query independant link metrics
- Query dependent link metrics
The reasons why it is becoming ever increasing to get to say 85% accuracy is because Google is constantly evolving, SEOmoz constantly plays catch up to Google. The web is constantly changing, within a year the index will probably change 80%, a case of out with the old and in with the new. Thus explaining the need for fresh content otherwise you will get left behind. And finally personal work on your website can change the results within Open Site Explorer, so if you make a site architecture change, gain new links or even lose links, these factors are taken into account when calcuting domain and page authority.
For a more indepth look at Open Site Explorer, check this post out by Rand Fishkin.
Tags: seomoz