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(Caveat: I'm an SEOmoz Associate, but I'm not one of the data scientists that calculate Domain Authority or Keyword Difficulty) Domain Authority is a significant part of the Keyword Difficulty calculation, and it's highly correlated with the final result. If I had to guess, I'd say Page Authority is an even bigger consideration. Personally, when looking at Keyword Difficulty, the "big 3" factors I take into account are: Domain/Page Authority & Trust Metrics On Page Optimization Incoming Links (both external & internal) Of course there are a hundred other factors, many of which can be seen by running a full report in the Keyword Analysis Tool. Often you'll see a page ranking for a keyword based on Domain Authority alone, or a few other minor factors, when in fact the page in question is terribly optimized or not targeted for the keyword at all. These are my favorite targets because they are often ranking accidentally, and a good effort at on-page optimization and the right backlinks can beat a high authority domain.

Hey Ryan, thanks for the ideas. Respectfully, I disagree however. With something as simple as 'rand(1,4)' in php you can generate random #s. There's no telling what Google could do with their algorithm(s). Okay, so it's (relatively) easy to do, but why would they do it? After-all, they have heavily invested in complicated models that do the ranking for them... Well, they've heavily invested in complicated algorithms, and if cracked, bump- there goes there flagship product.  I'm sure SEOmoz aren't the only people attempting to glean insight using machine learning. And perhaps, others don't like to publish their findings and tip anyone off. Of course, I'm not an A.I. scientist, so perhaps I misunderstand how unsupervised machine learning works, but I'm under the impression that it very well can be used to logically explain all of those factors. I'm sure there's tons and tons of work that would go into it, but if you had the resources (and some do), wouldn't you do it? This is why I wanted to post this question though- to get feedback and other opinions, so thanks Ryan!

I am confused. So lets that I have an ecommerce site that has 20 types(books, toys…) / 20 categories each / 20 subcategories each and thousands of products under each subcategory. When we say go flat, is it ideal to go all the way like http://www.website.com/type (20 of these), and http://www.website.com/category (400 of these) and http://www.webiste.com/subcategory (8000 of these)and thousands of product pages. So there is no page more than  1 directory level down. Does this mean flat architecture?

Hi Guys Thanks for the great advice here. I see that the last reply was in 2011. I am wondering is there any new plug-ins that people would recommend? Thanks

Not a huge fan of WordPress. But if you know WordPress, you would really like DNN.