Domain Authority

[theanglemedia]

Has anyone ever experienced a domain authority of 1, 0 links for web 2.0 websites like tumblr, wordpress, weebly, etc? I know it's normal to see a page authority of 1 if there are no links to a url or if opensite explorer hasn't been updated.

Is this some kind of bug with opensite explorer?

[mrdavidingram]

Hi,

This isn't necessarily an OSE bug, it is mainlydown to the differentiation between the sub domain and original root domain.

For example, if the following domain existing:

mrdavidingram.tumblr.com

What you are saying is the domain is tumblr.com, and should be reported as a DA90+.

However sub-domains are classed as their own domains and not part of the original root domain, so if this sub-domain hasn't built any authority then it would be reported as a DA1.

So basically a sub-domain doesn't benefit from the power of the main domain and the links pointing at it, otherwise all tumblr, wordpress.com and blogspot sites would be massively authoritative and dominiating the search results (which would be a nightmare for users!).

So if you ever see a example.tumblr.com or example.wordpress.com; even though you can see the domain of the host site in there, it is still being treated as a totally unique domain and website, just as if it was example.com

I think the confusion has come down to OSE, as there does seem to be some inconsistency between how they report these sites. Some they will report as a unique domain (DA1 for example), but others they will give a DA of the original host domaing (DA90+). I'm not sure why this is, hopefully one of the team can shed some light...

Hope that helps.

David

[theanglemedia]

Thanks - David. If I recall correctly, OSE used to show the DA of the root regardless of the site. As you mentioned it now appears to be selective...or inconsistent if you will.

[mrdavidingram]

Yeh, I've just done some testing and it seems pretty random. Hmmm...

In terms of how the search engines treat it, the above is correct, but OSE doesn't seem to have a hard and fast rule. I wonder how much this effects the sites they are linking to?

[theanglemedia]

Good point - I agree. In my opinion this affects the accuracy of using OSE as backlink analysis tool.

I also did some additionally testing and it seems like this issue isn't necessarily root domain specific. Ie: name1.tumblr.com shows a PA1 DA1 and name2.tumblr.com shows PA 1 DA 98. So is the issue with OSE or is it with the host website?