What Does the SEO Moz Crawler Take Into account?

[seanmccauley]

I'm working on a page that has links from some decent pages pointing to it, but a lot of them are low-value blog comments. So I'm pretty sure that its Page Authority is higher than it should be, compared to where it's ranking.

Does SEO moz take the type of link into account?

i.e. if it's a footer link, blog comment, or forum signature link; this should carry less weight than a link in the content of the page itself, as it does with Google.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Sean,

Good point, and this is a common issue with link metrics. I believe the metrics used to calculate most Moz metrics were recently tweaked and the models used to calculate them all adjusted by the in house data scientist, Dr. Matt Peters. I can't tell you exactly how every link is valued, but I can say that over time, Moz has tried to model thier metirics (MozTrust, DomainAuthority, MozRank) in ways that reflect real-world link metrics.

That said, in spite of the great progress, it remains a game of cat-and-mouse game with Google. We can guess how Google values certain links, but Moz metrics are far more likely to count links that Google is likely to disregard. In the end, as you have discovered, you often have to use your own eyes and judgement when evaluating links past the initial qualifying stage.