Are Moz Ratings that reliable/correlated against SERPS?

[TomLondon]

So 3 weeks in Penguin 2.0 and after an initial drop in rankings (4-5 places on top keywords from rank 1), I have seen a small climb in rankings by a couple places but have seen a huge jump in my DA, PA and Domain trust/rank... That FAR surpasses any other magicians website. However I am ranking below some really really poorly rated sites. I am getting a PA of 51 which is really high for the industry (maybe the highest).

If this is the case, why am I not number one for every keyword in my demographic? 
I know this is asked a lot but how reliable are Moz stats, I know no one can really know how Google rank sites on SERPS but if Moz is the best shouldn't it be kinda close?

Any thoughts on how accurate Moz rank is and also if it can be used as some indication of the SEO power behind a website.

[Chris.Menke]

Hey Magic,

Domain Authority is a measure of off-page factors such as linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc.   It demonstrates the _potential _a site has to rank well in Google without taking into account most keyword and on-page factors. A site that ranks best for "arctic circle", for example, may be very authoritative and have great domain authority because of the strength of its back links but it may not rank above other, less authoritative domains for "snow", for example, unless it has well-optimized concepts on the site pertaining to the term.

MozTrust is the “distance” between a given page and a seeded trust source on the Internet. Think of this like six degrees of separation: The closer you are linked to a trusted website, the more trust you have, yourself.  Again, this has to do with your ranking _potential,_not how well optimized a page is around a key concept.  If you take a page on a domain that has a link to it from the above mentioned arctic circle site and you delete all the content on it, but leave the URL, it will still maintain its trust score but it wouldn't rank for anything.

Also, sometimes google penalties will leave your site with high pagerank an other ranking factors, such as those measure on OSE, yet the site is stripped of its ability to show up in the results.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

It's hard to predict Google rankings, and there's no one metric that can do this reliably. The best we have to go on are metrics that correlate well with ranking potential. As of May 31, 2013, here's how the following correlated with Google rankings for US search results:

• Page Authority - 0.36
• Domain Authority - 0.19
• MozRank - 0.24
• Linking Root Domains - 0.30
• Total Links - 0.25
• External Links - 0.29

So Page Authority is the highest correlated metric that we know of - beating Google's PageRank by a wide margin. But as Chris points out, this is only a predictive metric. And while a 0.36 correlation is awesome in the SEO world, it's still a long way from a perfect correlation.

For more historical correlation data, I highly recommend looking at the 2011 Ranking Factors (we'll be updating this soon)

Generally, most SEOs have to take a number of metrics and data into account when trying to figure out the ranking potential of a webpage, and it's incredibly hard to create a computer model to replicate this.

Regardless, I hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.