Incorporate obvious Google penalties in OSE (to avoid inflated DA & PA)

[MediaMaze]

This post is deleted!

[Bondara]

I was thinking the same thing,

How does SEOMOZ handle penalised domains?

[Dr-Pete]

I'll give you the short answer - "obvious" is almost always less obvious than you'd imagine. Unfortunately, toolbar PR is often so out of date that it's hard to rely on, even though I certainly get your point and frustration in this case.

We have been working on a number of spam detection projects, to help discount links that are likely to be bad, but it ends up being a very complicated problem. I'll ping Dr. Matt Peters and see if there's anything he can add publicly.

[Matthew_Peters]

PA/DA are based only on the link to the page/domain and don't attempt to distinguish spam from non-spam (except through their dependence on mozTrust, which does do a decent job of identifying spam).  As you've noticed, they should be used in combination with some type of spam filter when evaluating sites.  There are practical reasons why we cannot or do not want to use PR.  One reason is the fact that PR is often out of date as Dr Pete mentioned.  Another is that we need to assign a PA/DA to every page and domain in the Mozscape index (>80 billion pages and >150 million domains) and it isn't possible to get PR at this scale.

We have spent some time investigating spam algorithms and I prototyped one last year that I presented at MozCon.  We do plan to revisit it in the future, but don't have any immediate plans to do so.

[MediaMaze]

I understand the difficulties in tackling this problem. Indeed PR is not a reliable factor to base an algorithm on. Given the size of the index any extra check will take lots of time (money), if you ever get to incorporating a good spam algorithm this would be a great addition.

For now, I will look at MozTrust more often.

Thanks for the replies, I appreciate it!