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Hi Aires - if I'm understanding your question correctly (content will essentially be pushed by a server connected to domain A when people visit domains B, C, D, E, F, etc behind the scenes) it sounds like you should be fine. Search engines don't much care where the content requests are going to, which is how things like CDNs work, so as long as the requests to www.domainb.de, for example, return the same content as before, you should be fine.

If, however, you're suggesting that requests that used to go to, for example, www.domainb.de, will now redirect to static.domaina.com, that's a different story and could have a substantive SEO impact (as the ccTLD benefits, and all the links/signals that help domainb.de will be lost). If you're redirecting those ccTLDs, that could have some negative impact on localization, which could be helping you out now.

I'm not sure I perfectly understood your question, but hopefully this is helpful.

Best of luck,
Rand

Thanks for the feedback Matt - definitely something we're looking into as we work on the next iteration of the tool. I think going up in report limits is something we can certainly do for the higher tiers in the future.

Well said - engagement > page views. Google's smart enough to understand that on more complex sites and with more complex technology/JS/etc, those aren't always perfect corollaries for one another.

Yeah - that's likely a combination of the new index being smaller and of us cutting out stuff that we think Google may not have been counting. In future indices, you should see it go up again. My advice is always to watch your competition's numbers, too, as relative indices like Mozscape will reflect those changes best in relative numbers.

I wouldn't worry about it at all. The engines are definitely advanced enough at this point to perceive "Electronics Expo" and separate that from "Electronic Sex Po." If you love the name and think it's brandable, go for it.

Hi Deacyde - that shouldn't be the message you're taking away from this post at all! As I noted above, you could improve the SEO, improve your link profile, and still see a reduction in Domain Authority as as a score due to how DA is done (on a relative scale, not an absolute scale). We could find more and better links to your site, and you'd still see a lower DA.

If a number of smaller sites in your field have all seen lower DA score in this index, that's indicative that it's nothing you've done, but rather, an indication that DA has been shifting across the board. If you're seeing rankings stay high and organic search traffic stay high, then there's nothing to worry about, and DA should still work just as well as a relative metric across sites (actually, slightly better given the improved correlations).

Header? It's pretty unusual to have or to get an external link in the header (most users assume, accurately, that headers are internal navigation).

If you're talking about internal links, no problem! Footers, headers, sidebar navs -- all are expected to have sitewide links. We're just talking about external links that can be perceived as link spam.

I also did a WB Friday video on this that should be going up in the next few weeks with more detail. Basic story in your case is, if the links are internal, and they're not spammy-anchor-text/intentionally manipulative/hidden from users/etc, you should be just fine.

Hi Joe - yes, it's most likely the fluctuations are because you're in that lower range. Remember that Moz can't see links you've disavowed in Google Webmaster Tools/Search Console, so we wouldn't be lowering DA/PA based on those (although, it's possible that, over time, as Google stopped counting links like that, our algorithm for PA/DA would "learn" and evolve, but that would take a while).

Thanks for the feedback Umit. We obviously have different views about what constitutes manipulation (and about the simplicity of the all-caps statement you've written above). That said, if the Moz community can be helpful to you on white hat types of tactics and questions, we'd love to be a resource.

Re: WB Friday - sorry to hear it. If you ever have suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or drop us a line.

No, that's not correct at all. As you can see from the other folks replying in the thread, and from reading my post and responses, we're simply saying that DA is a relative measure, not an absolute one. It's like ranking websites based on their visits rather than showing their raw number of visits. You could grow your site traffic by many thousands of new visitors, and still have a lower "rank" because others grew their traffic even more. That's just how relative metrics work.

There's a few likely explanations, but it's hard to know for sure which of these (or what combination) is at work.

#1 - They redirected other pages/sites to this one recently and Linkscape hasn't yet seen it (or they're hiding it from all bots except Google/Bing). That could explain the fast rankings on a low quality site, and why we haven't seen any links to it.

#2 - The site recently started gaining links that are helping them rank that Linkscape has yet to catch. This is certainly possible, as the latest index launched earlier this week with data crawled the first 2.5 weeks of November. Lots of spammy sites will often get ranked based on crap links for a few days or weeks before being caught and pushed out of the SERPs. The next Linkscape update (likely mid-end of December, possibly as late as early January) should show it. You might also check Majestic's "fresh index" which doesn't offer metrics, but does have pretty fast updates.

#3 - The site's doing something very shady (cloaked redirects as mentioned above or links that only the engines' bots can see).

Hope that helps!

Thanks Ed! Agree that this has been a long time coming (we've been working on this particular iteration of the tech underlying our link index for 18 months, and on trying to get here for almost 7 years!). Glad to hear it's looking good to you. There's even more features and improvement to come, but yeah, I'm super proud of the team for all the hard work, and especially for how screaming fast they've made it to access trillions of individual links. That's no easy problem

The brand of "text links" generally has not been good over the last few years. TLA was penalized by Google for a while, but is now back ranking for their own name. I don't know if TLB was ever hit in the same way, but I know both of them have occasionally sent emails to those who purchased their products noting that Google may have removed link value or even be penalizing them.

When I gave a favorable review to TLA, I specifically called out some of the white hat services, and I also did so prior to Patrick Gavin's sale of the network. Today, I'd be mostly skeptical of the value the "classic" link purchases could provide, though they may indeed have other, less guideline-violating products that are worthwhile.

Oh - and we did do an experiment with TLA in 2010 that I covered here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-we-bought-links-and-it-worked

Well, we still have some features to add and some kinks to work out, but yes, in the near future, if this beta goes well, we'll be replacing Open Site Explorer entirely (we may archive it in its current state, with the current index, for a while before killing it entirely, depending on feedback).

I agree it's awkward having both scores, but hopefully it's also very helpful to observe (as you did), that the new one has much better correlation. Just know that links aren't everything in the Google algo! Thus DA/PA can't be expected to perform perfectly in ranking predictions -- they're still just one element.

You might also check out http://flippa.com. Just be careful with buying expired domains, presuming that PA/DA may still be preserved. Google is actually taking a lot of steps to reset a site's authority/link profile on change of ownership to prevent manipulation through expired/sold domains.

Thanks for the feedback Ed! I agree with you that in addition to link metrics, Moz needs to get better at measuring on-page factors like searcher task accomplishment and markup and relevance to the query intent. Those are (hopefully) on the plates of team members at the company.

Hi BStone - apart from the obvious (it's manipulation and might violate Google's TOS/webspam guidelines), there's also a bunch of other items to consider:

• Google has access to Android and Chrome user/usage data to see which clicks are real/not real
• The referrer string would be passed along from wherever you placed it (and it wouldn't come from a validated, Google.com address)
• Google can see search query data and knows when a query has actually hit their server (and all sorts of details about where/from whom). Artificial inflation of those, even in our tests, only had a very short lifespan in terms of influencing SERPs (see https://moz.com/blog/impact-of-queries-and-clicks-on-googles-rankings-whiteboard-friday and https://moz.com/rand/queries-clicks-influence-googles-results/ for more details)

Thus, IMO, this isn't a pragmatic or effective way of influencing Google's perceptions of clicks/CTR.

Thanks Ed, really appreciate it (and fascinating to hear how much progress you've made on the solving query intent side! That's awesome).

The shortened URLs will pass any link equity they have to their target, but using a shortener to link to has no added benefit, and the 301 redirect will actually cost you some PageRank leakage according to Google.

Sweet! Glad to hear it John - let us know if items come up that you'd like to see improved upon.