New Mozscape index released! Learn just what's been going on.

[MattRoney]

Hi everyone,

I'm very, very pleased to announce that the latest Mozscape index has been released five days ahead of schedule, and it's back up to the quality you expect from Moz!

It's no secret that we've struggled this year with our index. I can't overstate how much we appreciate everyone sticking with us—we know how hard this has been. The good news—well, apart from the early release—is that we've worked out the issue, and we expect to finally be back on track moving forward.

Director of Engineering Martin York has shared a post to the Moz blog explaining just what's been going so wrong, and outlining our plan for the future. Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for being such an incredible community.

As for the folks who are seeing Domain Authority and Page Authority drops since the index release, please see Rand's recent post for more.

[Ria_]

Just when you start automatically expecting Mozscape update to be delayed... The new index gets released early! Thanks, guys!

[BeckyKey]

Hi Matt

Will this affect the Domain Authority score Moz shows for a site?

Thank you!

[CuriosityMedia]

Our site just experienced a sudden drop in our DA overnight. Could it be caused by this Moz indexation update?

[AleksanderOlsen]

Wondering about this myself.... I´ve done a lot of work for one of our sites, but still no increase in DA...

Aleks

[MattRoney]

Very possibly. Domain Authority is calculated using the index, and updates along with it. If the new index indicates that a site's Domain Authority has changed, then it will update.

EDIT: Rereading this, I realize it's kind of misleading. Shifts in the index can affect Domain Authority whether or not anything has changed in the site's link profile. Because Domain Authority is always on a 1-100 scale, shifts in the size and composition of the index can essentially change the definition on a given score.

With this in mind, we generally recommend using DA to benchmark against competitors rather than as an absolute measure of link profile quality. If your DA has dropped but so have DAs across your industry, then you're actually in the same relative position. Does that make sense?

[MattRoney]

Yes. Domain Authority is recalculated with each new index. I'll quote Rand, from a comment on the blog post:

"Yeah - almost certainly related to this update, and very possibly to the quantity of domains we were previously crawling and counting from .cn and .pl. Going forward, PA/DA should keep getting slightly more accurate."

[CuriosityMedia]

Thank you for this very helpful response, Matt!