DA as a measure of link-building success/failure?

[90miLLA]

Hi all

What would be a good way to track weather a website is doing good or bad in regards to link-building in google's eyes? Is the Domain Authority the best credential?

If a website is penalized for link-building schemes, would it reflect on the Domain Authority shown in Moz Analytics? What other Moz score would reflect this scenario?

Best regards & Thank you for your help.

Carlos

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Carlos,

The best measure of how well a site is doing, is when you look at the positions in the SERPs and how much traffic they are getting.

As far as I am aware, if a site is penalised, MOZ has no way to tell this, so it is not going to be reflected in their own stats (someone correct me if I am wrong here).

-Andy

[90miLLA]

Thanks for that Andy,

How would I be able to take a look at a website's SERPs and also compare it to others?

Carlos

[Andy.Drinkwater]

You will need to use a package that allows you to track competitors. I'm not sure MOZ lets you do that, unless you had a pro account and just used you allocation on your own site and others.

There are lots of tracking apps out there though.

-Andy

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Moz data scientists are working on spam scores that will help in analysis, but it's not ready for public consumption yet.

One often used tool for detecting penalties is Searchmetrics Visibility charts. It's not hugely accurate, but can often give you a rough guess: http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/domains/visibility

[90miLLA]

Thanks Andy & Cyrus,

So what would one need to look out for; the SEO keyword visibility and their trends?

Also, if a website is penalized, would it be penalized entirely across all keywords or just for the applicable keyword(s)?

Carlos

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Carlos,

Aside from visibility in the SERPs, look to see if the site is indexed by Google. This is by no means a sure sign, but if you have a site that used to be indexed, and no longer is, it is usually a sign that something odd is going on.

The only way you can ever be 100% sure that a site has had a penalty, is if you get  manual action message from Google. The rest of the time, you need to check analytics to see when drops in searches and traffic happened and see if they correlate with a known algorithm update.

-Andy

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Depends on the type of penalty. Manual spam penalties almost always target the entire site. Algorithmic filters like Penguin can target groups of specific keywords. Though to an outside observer, it's often hard to tell them apart.