How To Check Your Domain Authority (Is It Fake)?

The way you check your Domain Authority is by going to OpenSiteExplorer.com. When you open this URL, it will redirect you to the MOZ page where you can check your DA and PA.

You are only allowed to check a certain amount of URLs per day.

I realized that I cannot figure out my site’s DA (Domain Authority).

Why?

The value provided by Moz is completely inaccurate.

Moz says,

The Mozscape index is still growing. Keep in mind that, while large, our index doesn’t cover the entire web. If you have a smaller or new site, it’s possible we haven’t crawled it yet. When we discover a new link, it’s added to our queue, but it can take 1-2 index updates before we actually crawl the page.”

“The reason that we don’t immediately crawl links we find during a crawl is because of scheduling. Any links the crawler sees must first go through the scheduler and be deemed important enough (we don’t want to spend time crawling spam or in honey traps). This means there may be a few days gap between seeing a link for the first time and when the link is actually crawled. Also, if a link is not in a high-ranking root domain (or in a root domain that has lots of links), then it may not even make the cut to be in the schedule.”

Backlink Count

Let’s see the backlinks. This is from Moz:

yexpd-MOZ

And Google Search Console says my site has 60 backlinks.

SEO Spyglass also shows me a similar picture:

And finally, here is Majestic:

yexpd Majestic

As you can see, there is a huge difference between the backlink count shown by the different tools.

What About The DA?

Since DA is made up of the quality and number of the links pointing to the domain, it is easy to see that my site’s DA is completely incorrect. It has more than 9 backlinks and is not counting links from Quora, GoDaddy forums, etc.

I do a lot of search for expired domains and I check their Domain Authority. I also check other websites. I see a lot of them with strange numbers – e.g.:

  • MOZ shows that there are zero backlinks, but the Domain Authority is 12.
  • If you enter a URL as example.com, or www.example.com, you can get wildly different numbers, just because how the specific domain is used.
  • There is a phenomenon of DA “yoyo”, it can change randomly when you check it at different times. This must be an algorithmic problem.

How Incorrect Is the Data?

People buy and sell domains and many times they price them based on the domain’s DA. Are they making a mistake?

DA is based on a logarithmic scale. Unfortunately I don’t know the exact values, however when you start out at zero, it will take a lot less additional links to increase your DA by 1 unit when you are at DA 15. And when you are at DA 25, it will take even more backlinks.

Therefore we can say that the higher the DA number, it is more likely to have a correct value.

Also, I check my site’s DA quite regularly, but it doesn’t seem to be increasing step by step.

When I registered it as an expired domain, it was DA 6.

A month later somehow it became DA 10, then DA 15 and now DA 16.

There are a lot of irregularities, therefore it is advised that you consider the DA as an indicator based on its range.

DA over 30 is considered medium powerful.

DA over 60 or 80 is super powerful.

DA 15-30 is a range that can be easily beaten with link building.

DA under 15 is weak.

MOZ tends to err towards zero in the case of new websites, as it doesn’t deem them important enough to index their links.

On the other end of the scale, unfortunately I have no idea how many links are still in the MOZ database that no longer exist. I am not sure what the crawling algorithm is for removing broken links.

Is It Worth Signing Up For MOZ?

Unfortunately Moz does its crawling based on its own scheduler, disregarding user data.

If you take Google, for example, you can submit your URL, you can delete a URL from the index. MOZ doesn’t have such a correction feature.

However I keep seeing their pitch to sign up for Pro. My question is, would you sign up if you knew that the data of your own site is completely bozo and you don’t even have the chance to add the links that you positively know about?

I bet you wouldn’t. I guess the people who have no clue sign up.

I am not trying to be critical, but Moz must be losing tons of money because of this.

Imagine that someone was trying to buy a domain in the real estate niche.

Do you think the seller could answer, “Sorry, I only have my domains analyzed to letter ‘F’… I don’t have the specifics for the domain you are trying to buy. I don’t have the DA and I don’t have the estimated price.”

Absolutely no. The seller would put the domain on the immediate analysis schedule to get the sale.

For MOZ, putting their own scheduling in front of customers’ needs is a bad strategic decision. Even Google lets you upload your own sitemap and your site will get crawled in a few days, even if you are a nobody.

If I was in the position of Moz, I would at least let my users upload the links to their site they know about, I would put it on the immediate crawl list and I would put it in the data base to attract customers.

DA is not the only metric that is incorrect, backlink counts of the different backlink checkers can by wildly different as well.

And an analysis could be done on Majestic SEO’s CF and TF, I never understood whey they need a fresh index and a historic index.

Backlinks are backlinks and it is their own private problem what database they keep it in, I just want to know the correct number, however it seems like it is impossible.

About the Author

I am into expired domains, niche sites and sales funnels.

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