Does "Disallow: /xmlrpc.php" in robots.txt affect moz tools ability to fetch DA?

[Foli]

Just checked a website for Domain Authority using Moz' tool, however it returned 1 for DA, which should be unlikely. I have been trying to find the problem and found "Disallow: /xmlrpc.php" in robots.txt. Could this affect Moz' tools ability to get the required data?

[dMaLasp]

Hi,

I don’t think that’s the reason of a low DA, xmlrpc.php it’s a file that for security lots of websites block even in htaccess for prevent access.

Do you check the domain age? It's a new website?

Regards

[Foli]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

The website is not new, and the domain was created 4.2014.

I doubted it would be that, but cant figure out what else it could be...Perhaps I have to accept the fate offered by moz tool?...

[ViviCa1]

What type of TLD is it, i.e. co.uk or .com etc? There are some that aren't supported by Moz and for those you'll see a DA of 1.

[Foli]

its a .fi domain. I have tried with many .fi domains and it works. Also Moz shows that it is getting 0 link data from the webpage, which means something might be blocking moz's tool from crawling.

[tawnycase]

Hey there, Tawny from Moz's Help Team here.

That Disallow command shouldn't be affecting your DA score; that's calculated based on our own metrics and your backlink profile.

Domain Authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. It is made up of an aggregate of metrics (MozRank, MozTrust, general link profile, and more) that each have an impact on this score. it can be difficult to directly influence your DA, but one way to move toward increasing it would be to improve your overall SEO. A great place to start with that could be to focus on link building! You can learn more about link building here and get a more detailed explanation of Domain Authority through this resource.

In general, I'd recommend keeping in mind that all of these metrics are relative with respect to the other sites included in our index. The metrics will probably have some additional context when compared to sites similar to your own, including your competitors.

Rand does a great job of breaking down how to interpret DA fluctuations through this post.

I think you've already pinpointed the reason we don't have a DA score of higher than 1 for your site — you're not seeing any link information in our index. If we don't have any linking data for your site, your DA will naturally drop, as a big part of our calculation is unavailable.

Just a few points on how we compile our index:

• We grab the most recent index.
• We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains).
• We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled ~130 billion URLs

The idea here is that we're focusing on the highest-quality links we can find, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we're aiming to report the most valuable ones available!

Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many reasons - including the crawl-ability of sites, the number of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. This also has the effect of slightly biasing our index in favor of newer links. Links are only cached in the index for around 180 days. After that, unless the tools have a compelling reason to return to your site and the sites linking to yours, re-crawl, and re-index them, those links can fall back out of our index. That doesn't mean they don't exist and aren't out there on the web, just that our tools don't see them anymore.

You can see our most recently updated schedule here as well as some more technical metrics on our Mozscape API Updates page. You can also see when the last and next updates happened on the Open Site Explorer (OSE) homepage at any time.

Since Moz focuses on quality of links over quantity, we are always focused on the most relevant links to display to our users. It's possible that Moz's index will leave out some of the lower-quality (non-link juice providing) links out of our index because of this. So, that might explain why you may see some discrepancies with what other tools may be showing.

You can read more about how we build our index in our guide here.

I know that's a ton of information, so if you've still got questions, feel free to drop us a line at help@moz.com and we'll do our best to sort things out for ya.

[Foli]

Thank you for the breakdown of how the DA calculation works. The dilemma here is that with other tools, such as Raven Tools, it finds almost 300 backlinks for the website where Moz states it found none. Does this imply that none of those backlinks are relevant? The webpage is also linked internally, and moz returns a value of 0 for that also.

[tawnycase]

It's not necessarily that those links you're seeing with other tools but not with Moz's tools aren't relevant; it could just be that we haven't crawled and indexed the sites linking back to yours recently enough to include links from them in our index. If you're seeing 0 internal links reported, then that definitely means we haven't fully indexed your site, or if we have it was long enough ago that the linking data is no longer stored in the index, and we'll need to re-crawl and re-index.

The best thing you can do to get your site indexed by our tools is to search for it and the sites linking to it in Open Site Explorer. That should prompt our tools to visit your site and crawl and index it within the next few index updates.

[Foli]

I see. Thanks for the info, Tawny.