DA/PA Fluctuations: How to Interpret, Apply, & Understand These ML-Based Scores

[randfish]

No, that's not correct at all. As you can see from the other folks replying in the thread, and from reading my post and responses, we're simply saying that DA is a relative measure, not an absolute one. It's like ranking websites based on their visits rather than showing their raw number of visits. You could grow your site traffic by many thousands of new visitors, and still have a lower "rank" because others grew their traffic even more. That's just how relative metrics work.

[PGD2011]

Reading through this thread. I'm frustrated too. It seems like acquiring PA/DA data is super hard for Moz. Why are you using this data? How are we supposed to use this data?

Building on your example of Japan and Healthcare. If Japan no longer is number one for healthcare, and I can only track three competitors in Moz, how am I supposed to figure out who the competitor is that causes the issue?

So, I'm tracking Japan, Korea, Viet Nam, and the UK. Last month Japan was number one for healthcare. Korea was number two. Viet Nam is number three, and the UK is number four.

This month Japan has fallen to number three, but the other countries have fallen as well. Obviously, someone is at number one. How do I figure that out? Shouldn't I now include the number one as a competitor in Moz?

Honestly, I've long been confused about how, when, and where to use the DA, PA metrics. They don't seem to be good metrics to use for evaluating how well a site is doing. I only use them when looking at sites to get links from, but it sounds like it's not a very good metric for doing that either.

[PGD2011]

Sorry Rand, but I still don't see the benefit of tracking this metric at all. Moz really needs to do an indepth post about what DA is and how to use it. I'm sorry if it's already been done, and I haven't seen it.

Seems like it could be a beneficial metric to track if you could have a larger pool of competitors to see what's happening to their DA.