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Hi there!

Apologies for the long wait for a response! It's sort of a convoluted answer.

For practical purposes, the search engines treat subdomains as their own separate domains. So, even though Blogger.com has a DA of 92, if you were to start a blog there you'd still be "starting over" when it comes to building link authority. A new blog there will notbenefit from blogger.com's existing authority.

Where Open Site Explorer and the Mozscape index are concerned, though, you'll still see a DA of 92 on that new, not-yet-established blog. In the simplest terms, that's because OSE calculates _domain _authority, not subdomain authority.

So, in this case, Page Authority would be the better metric by which to evaluate your new blog, as it will be specific to the home page at yourblog.blogger.com.

Does that make sense?

You should pay attention to the Moz blog tomorrow.

This post should shed some light on how Spam Score is calculated, as should this Whiteboard Friday. It's calculated differently from, say, Domain or Page Authority, which are nearly straight link metrics. I'd recommend going through both, as they'll give you a much better sense of how to lower your score.

This is actually really common. Often new pages will rank very well temporarily while Google "figures out" where to rank them. I can't guarantee that's what's happening, but it's quite possible.

Billy is right, for all intents and purposes. It's VERY possible—even probable—that the authority difference is due to the bulk of your backlinks going to that page.

You can learn more about how authority is calculated here.

Hi Chris! Sounds like Billy and Thomas might be able to help. Do you have any info for them?

Hi Alick! Did Lynn answer your question, or would you like more help?

That's a valid point. I'll make sure our Product folks have seen it.

Hi there, friends!

This week's discussion comes from today's Whiteboard Friday:

Rand's outlined SEO practices that are outdated and no longer effective. Did anything catch you off-guard, making you want to pivot your strategy? Anything that you disagree with, or that you feel still works well regardless? What other tactics, in your experience, no longer work?

Well, let's see. Structured data in this sense comes down to a method of labelling elements of your site in order to clarify what they are for search engine crawlers, microdata is a form of structured data that works in HTML5, and Schema is a standard for microdata. So Schema is microdata is structured data. All Schema (in this use) is structured data, but not all structured data is Schema.

Maybe something like, if structured data represents all the team sports in the world, and microdata represents every game intended to be played on a football pitch, then Schema may be the Laws of the Game—the standard rules for international soccer.

Also, go Seattle Sounders!

Submitting your sitemap gets Google the crawl your site faster, but your site will be crawled sooner or later whether you do or not.

Hi Brian! Any update? Are you still waiting for your site to be indexed?

Hi ozil! Did Eric's answer help? We'd love an update.

Hi Rosemary! There's actually a pretty decent explanation here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data

Structured data is a system of pairing a name with a value that helps search engines categorize and index your content. Microdata is one form of structured data that works with HTML5. Schema.org is a project that provides a particular set of agreed-upon definitions for microdata tags.

Does that make sense?

Hi Paul! This one might be better suited to our Help Team. You can reach them at help[at]moz[dot]com, or via that little blue button in the lower-right of your browser window. They'll be able to look into the billing system and work out what's up.

Hi Krishna,

If you haven't read it, I'd also suggest checking out our Beginner's Guide to Link Building.

Hi Anoop! It looks like your site seems to be indexed now: http://www.screencast.com/t/pFNk0nVsZH

Hi yacpro13! Did Eric or Thomas answer your question, and if so, would you mind marking one or both responses as a "Good Answer?"

Otherwise, what questions do you still have?

Hi Eric! Our Rank Tracker can certainly show you your rankings vs. competitors. However, we don't gather that data if you're not tracking it, so if your client wants to know how they used to rank against competitors before the campaign was created, you're out of luck.

Jordan mentions SEMRush, and I believe they may have a tool that can help.

Hi Krishna! It's a bit on the older side, but Cyrus Shepard wrote a piece a while back called Keywords to Concepts that might help you get your head around this.