Moz Launches Domain Authority Version 2.0 To Bring SEO Metrics Into 2019

As an SEO there are very few things in life that make us smile or feel any joy. When you're spending your day criticising and improving a website from its technical aspects to its content, or doing painful link building, you become somewhat of a wet blanket. While this is a bit of an exaggeration, I wanted to showcase how happy it makes SEO's when we get something new to work with and as of this month, we will. Moz has officially rolled out a new version of its popular domain authority metric. 

Domain Authority has served the SEO industry for years as a predictive measure of ranking ability; however, as of late it started to become less effective as it couldn't keep pace with search engine algorithms. But this is all set to change, as of March 5th 2019, Moz will deploy its advanced machine-learned model which incorporates some new factors into its algorithm to gauge the strength of a site better than ever before.

Note: DA is a proprietary Moz metric and is only a predictive metric — search engines don't use it to determine rankings.

You can find the official announcement on the Moz Blog

What is domain authority?

Domain Authority is a metric created by MOZ to help SEO's and site owners gauge the ranking ability of their pages and website as a whole. The Moz Domain Authority became a quick successor to Google’s PageRank, which was officially died in 2013. It along with AHREFs domain rating metric have been the go-to metrics when evaluating a websites organic performance and search ranking ability.

How is domain authority two different?

The new update comes at a time when the Moz Domain Authority metric was under intense debate over its inability to filter out a few blackhat methods and provide an accurate representation of a domain and how Google may view a domain's value. For DA to remain a relevant metric to the SEO community, it needed to be updated. The new Domain Authority update boasts of its strongest correlations with SERPs and its ability to handle link manipulation.

The new Domain Authority metric is based on Moz’s improved machine-learning model and takes into consideration some new factors when calculating a site's score. 

Considerations such as:

• A 35 trillion strong link index
• Link quality information
• Link spam score
• Link manipulation and more

In addition to better calculations, the new DA will be updated daily instead of monthly so you can get a real-time view of how you're improving your site instead of having to wait for a bulk update each month. 

How will domain authority version 2 affect SEO?

Domain authority version 2 DOES NOT affect SEO or rankings directly and you will not see a drastic drop in traffic due to your new point allocation. It does, however, give you better insight on your ability to rank and how you measure up against fellow sites competing for the same keywords in SERPs. DA can serve webmasters well by giving you a benchmark on how much you need to grow or which keywords you should be targeted in order to get relevant traffic to your site. 

Show your authority in search

The new version of domain authority will give SEO's a better oversight into their practices and measure their efforts as well as gauging competition and the ability to compete for SERP impressions share. DA version 2 is a big win for the industry and will really help those looking to improve their organic search when used and interpreted correctly. 

If your site has seen a large 10 - 15 point drop due to the latest update, then I recommend you look into speaking to a professional SEO who can provide you with a site audit that will guide you to get your site back on track and remain competitive in search results. 

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Recommended reading

If you want to know more about domain authority and have time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, then we recommend you check out the following articles:

• 10 Reasons Why Your Site Doesn't Rank For *Insert Keyword*
• What Is Googles Organic Search E-A-T Score?
• 10 Off-Site SEO Strategies Your Business Is Ignoring

Tags: seo, search engine optimisation , moz