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Update: Domain Authority 2.0 has arrived! Check it out over in Link Explorer or in your Campaigns, and visit our resource center for more information about the change. Hey Moz friends, I’m excited to share some news from the Moz product team. In the last few months our team of data scientists have been hard at work developing an improvement to one of the favorite SEO metrics used in digital marketing: Domain Authority, also referred to as “DA.” On March 5, 2019, we’ll release the new and improved Domain Authority algorithm, which includes a number of new factors that make this score even more accurate, trustworthy, and predictive than ever before. Having worked with marketing clients in the past and reported on Domain Authority during monthly reviews, I wanted to make sure we give our community enough advance notice to understand what is changing, why it’s changing, and what it might mean for your reporting.  Sudden, unexpected fluctuations in any core metric you use in reporting have the potential to make your job more difficult, so we want to help you start the conversation about this change with your stakeholders. Let’s start with the “why” ... Why is Moz changing the DA algorithm? The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is constantly changing. Rankings change and the algorithms that drive those rankings change. For Moz to ensure you have the most accurate prediction possible, it means we need to update our algorithm from time to time to ensure it delivers on its promise. You trust Moz, in part, because of the accuracy of the data we create. We want to make sure that we’re providing you with the best data to make your work easier. To ensure that DA continues to accurately predict ability of sites to rank, and to remain reliable over time, we’ve decided to make some improvements. What can I expect from the DA algorithm update? Many sites should expect to see a change to their current Domain Authority score. Depending on the site, this change might be insignificant, but it’s possible the new algorithm will cause material adjustments. The new Domain Authority takes into consideration a number of additional factors, such as link pattern identification and Moz’s Spam Score metric, to help you deploy your SEO strategy. How can I prepare for this algorithm update? I recommend that you reach out to your stakeholders or clients prior to the March 5th launch to discuss this upcoming change. This can be an opportunity to both refresh them on the utility of Domain Authority, as well as plan for how to use it for additional link building or ranking projects. Visit this page to check out resources that may help you to have conversations with your stakeholders. If you feel inclined to save a snapshot of your current Domain Authority and history, you can consider exporting your historical data from your Moz Pro account. Is historical data changing? Yes. When the new DA algorithm goes into place, all historical data will be affected. However, for anyone who has an active Moz Pro campaign, you will be able to see a historical representation of the old DA line for reference for an interim period. As the “Metrics over time” chart is designed to help track your work over time, we believe applying the update to both past and present DA scores will help you to best track linear progress. Is Domain Authority an absolute score or a relative one? Domain Authority is a relative, comparative metric. Moz evaluates over 5 trillion pages and greater than 35 trillion links to inform Domain Authority. Your site’s links are evaluated amongst those trillions of links. Because of this, it is important to compare your DA to your competition, peers, and other sites that show up in search results important to your strategy. In terms of how to use Domain Authority, nothing is changing. If you use it to evaluate domains to purchase, it will function exactly the same. If you use it to find hidden keyword ranking opportunities, it will still be your best friend. It’s the same trusty tool you used before — we just sharpened for you. I saw a change to my DA when Link Explorer launched last April. What’s the difference between that change and this one? In April 2018, Moz released its new link index along with its new research tool, Link Explorer. Because the link index was so much larger than the previous index, and because Domain Authority is based on attributes discovered in that index, scores changed. Any changes that occurred were due to the upgrade of that link index, not how the algorithm calculated scores. The change coming in March 2019 will be an actual algorithm update to how Domain Authority is calculated. How will Page Authority (PA) be affected by this update? Page Authority will not be impacted by the March 2019 update. This particular algorithm update is specific to Domain Authority only. Will API users be affected at the same time? Yes. The Domain Authority metric in all of our products, including our API, will be affected by this update on March 5th. Check out this page for more resources about the Domain Authority algorithm update. You can also read more here in Russ Jones’s announcement post on the blog. We’d love to hear from you here in this Q&A thread, or you can send an email over to help@moz.com with any questions.

Hi all, I was wondering what happend at the last MOZ-update. The MOZ-health page has no current errors and i've checked a lot of websites probably about 50 a 60 from our customers and from our competitiors and everybody seems to have a decrease in DA's / PA's. Not just a couple went up and down like normally would happen, but all seems to have dropped.... Is anyone seeing the same in their campaigns? Greetings,
Niels

Hi guys, I have noticed an unusual Domain Authority (DA) drop in mid November for many different websites here in Sweden. There was a Moz update the 12th of November which I assume has to do with this drop. I have attached the DA history chart to visualize the drop. Does someone have any information about: Did the drop in DA have to do with the update the 12^th? Did the new update have a new type of metric calculation? Is anyone else experiencing this drop? Any extra details would be helpful. Thanks a lot guys. YLhKVwF.png

Why the Domain Authority of my website decreased? Last month my website www.i-phony.com domain authority was 32/100. but today I see the result is only 23/100 . What was the reason behind this big decrease !! Your answer is highly appreciated and very valuable for me. Best regards

Howdy y'all. I wanted to give a brief update (not quite worthy of a blog post, but more than would fit in a tweet) about the latest Mozscape index update. On January 27th, we released our largest web index ever, with 285 Billion unique URLs, and 1.25 Trillion links. Our previous index was also a record at 217 Billion pages, but this one is another 30% bigger. That's all good news - it means more links that you're seeking are likely to be in this index, and link counts, on average, will go up. There are two oddities about this index, however, that I should share: The first is that we broke one particular view of data - 301'ing links sorted by Page Authority doesn't work in this index, so we've defaulted to sorting 301s by Domain Authority. That should be fixed in the next index, and from our analytics, doesn't appear to be a hugely popular view, so it shouldn't affect many folks (you can always export to CSV and re-sort by PA in Excel if you need, too - note that if you have more than 10K links, OSE will only export the first 10K, so if you need more data, check out the API). The second is that we crawled a massively more diverse set of root domains than ever before. Whereas our previous index topped out at 192 million root domains, this latest one has 362 million (almost 1.9X as many unique, new domains we haven't crawled before). This means that DA and PA scores may fluctuate more than usual, as link diversity are big parts of those calculations and we've crawled a much larger swath of the deep, dark corners of the web (and non-US/non-.com domains, too). It also means that, for many of the big, more important sites on the web, we are crawling a little less deeply than we have in the past (the index grew by ~31% while the root domains grew by ~88%). Often, those deep pages on large sites do more internal than external linking, so this might not have a big impact, but it could depend on your field/niche and where your links come from. As always, my best suggestion is to make sure to compare your link data against your competition - that's a great way to see how relative changes are occurring and whether, generally speaking, you're losing or gaining ground in your field. If you have specific questions, feel free to leave them and I'll do my best to answer in a timely fashion. Thanks much! p.s. You can always find information about our index updates here.

Hi guys! Our site www.carwow.co.uk appears to have been punched in the face by the latest Moz update. It's claiming our #linking root domains has dropped from 225 to 135 and has subsequently hit our DA from 38 to 35. We haven't disavowed any links and our off-site strategy has been going well the past 2 months. Search performance has increased by around 15% (around 5k sessions) and rankings have improved week on week. Any idea if this is a Moz error? That's almost a 50% drop in linking root domains. Thanks, James