Suggestion to Improve Moz's Link Data

[AHC_SEO]

Hello All.

The recent Index update (29th January) seems to have produced quite a few shocks to Moz Pro users. Index updates always cause panic and joy every time they are released. However, I feel this is a big improvement that could be made.

In this last index, the DA for my site has remained the same. I was expecting a rise, simply because I have been doing some link building since October and was expecting the results to start showing around this time. However, the link metrics for my site looked worse this month than ever before. The index clearly didn't crawl sites and pages that it has crawled the last couple of indexes, and I noticed a few links disappeared from the metrics altogether, links that I know still exist. So I have a suggestion...

If Moz has collected link data in previous indexes, can it not preserve that data rather than starting afresh with every new index. Regular checks could be conducted on existing link data to identify expired or broken links, but to disregard them and start anew with every index seems a little odd. That way, Moz would have much more accurate and comprehensive link data which would help to avoid the DA inaccuracy, and provide users with a better measure of how their site is performing against the rest of the web.

This may be naive because I do not know the technical side to index updates. Any thoughts, advice, suggestions etc would be appreciated.

[JordanRailsback]

Hi Trevor!

As it turns out, we do have a cache on our index to help stop valid links from falling out of our view. However, we're not able to guarantee that all links we've previously indexed will be re-indexed within that cache period. So, it can certainly still happen that links will drop out of our index. In general, this helps to promote a stable index, while still preserving freshness and relevance of links that we report on.

As far as metrics like DA and PA go, it's always important to remember that these are relative metrics, rather than absolute. While it always feels good to see them climb higher and higher, a consistent score or even a drop doesn't necessarily mean that there has been no improvement. I'd definitely recommend checking out this post by Rand on ways to consider these metrics: https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores