Why does this spam page have such high authority?

[catalogondemand]

This post is deleted!

[AndrewWheeler58]

Hi catalogondemand,

The million dollar homepage from Alex Tew was a big deal for its innovation back in 2005, and attracted a huge amount of buzz in the media when it launched and started to gain momentum.

This resulted in high PR, authoritative links from all over the place - the worlds media, tech blogs and even a dedicated Wikipedia page.

All this authority going to the root domain will flow to the other pages on the site, and as the external links on the page you refer to are 'dofollow', will also funnel out to your competitors website.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

[catalogondemand]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the response. I see your logic, and it makes perfect sense.

But it still bothers me, because surely the smart folks at Google know that this is really junk. Given that Google's goal is to deliver quality results to search queries, how can it be that they would use this site to determine authority? Wouldn't you think that they would blacklist those sites that clearly are there solely for purposes of spam links?

My point is that yes, I get the algorithmic reason, but common sense says that links from this site are worthless with respect to "authority".

Tim

[AndrewWheeler58]

Hi Tim,

Yes, I agree with you as fundamentally they are paid links.

The 'correct' way to handle them in this case would be for them to be no followed - the fact they haven't, and they still pass authority, shows Google is still behind in detecting this activity algorithmically.

It remains to be seen if they do crack down on it. I don't think they will (unless they receive multiple spam reports and stamp out individual sites) and instead continue evolving the algo towards having more emphasis on social linking factors and eventually devalue these older SEO practices.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Andrew

[RyanKent]

Why does this spam page have such high authority?

Andrew's analysis of this subject is right on the money. I will add a couple important points:

1. DA / PA are SEOmoz metrics. They are independent metrics created by SEOmoz. These metrics are not endorsed by Google.

2. DA / PA offer insight into a a web page's backlink profile without regard to any other factors. As I look at the SEOmoz site today, it has a DA of 95. If SEOmoz was to create "The Ultimate Spam Page" and filled it with pure spam (i.e. viagra, buy links, free nude pics, etc), that page's DA would still be 95 because DA is a sitewide metric and applies to all pages on the domain, irregardless of the content on each page.

If this web page earned links from SEOs and other websites then the page could have a PA of 63 or more, just like the page you shared.

When you refer to the web page as "spam", you are referring to it's content which has nothing to do with it's DA / PA or backlinks.