Over the past few months, Google is continually being criticised for its frequent and infamous Pandas and Penguins. Surprisingly, people are increasingly ditching PageRank in favour of Moz (formerly SEEOMoz) Domain Authority, and
the trend has been on the rise for quite some time now. So does that
mean that PageRank's authority is being undermined? And what exactly is
Domain Authority? More importantly, how do the two stack up against each
other? In this post, we attempt to answer some of these questions.
Google PageRank
As most of you know by now, Google PageRank is a measure of a site's popularity on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the highest. It mostly depends on the number of nofollow and dofollow backlinks on your blog, and it is one of the factors that effect your SERP (Search Engine Result Page) position.
Moz Domain Authority
Now the Domain Authority metric by Moz is a bit like PageRank in the
sense that it is a domain-level rank. But it is more concerned with how a
website will perform in search results. It is measured on a scale of
100, and is updated frequently - once or twice every month.
Differences between PageRank and Domain Authority
To get a better understanding of why people are trending more towards
Domain Authority these days, let us look at the difference between the
two rank metrics.
Frequency
Moz Domain Authority, at any given time, is usually more up-to-date than
Google PageRank. Pr only gets updated quarterly - every three months.
But DA changes once or twice every month. So even if a site has
radically improved, its PR might not get updated for another couple of
months, which is a lot of time.
Accuracy
Google PR is measured on a scale of 0-10, which I think is one of the
biggest problems with it. Google rates itself as 9, so you can really
only go from 0 to 8 (rarely 9). Since the gradation is so crude and
abrupt, you can't tell if you're going up or down or staying at the same
place when you get the same PR score two times in a row. It's like
being only able to adjust your thermostat in degrees of 10. Imagine
going from 20 degrees to directly 30 degrees. There's no middle ground,
no way to tell apart two temperatures both in the 20s.
With Domain Authority, you get a much finer scale of 0-100. So you now
get a hundred grades instead of just 10. So you can monitor your
progress and trends in much greater resolution, or detail.
Depth
Google PageRank is broadly based on the number of nofollow and dofollow
links and backlinks. But there's a lot of other things that Google
doesn't disclose. So when you see a PR figure of, let's say 5, you don't
get to know the breakdown of points, or in other words, you don't know
what things contributed towards this score. So we can see a lot of
opacity in Google PageRank.
Domain Authority, on the other hand, is more transparent, and it tells
about your progress in areas like Linking Root Domains, Total Links,
MozTrust, MozRank, and so on. This way, you get to know exactly where
you are going wrong.
Importance
Google employees have this tendency to disregard the actual importance
of PageRank. They always advise people not to put much stock into it, as
it is only one of the 200 signals Google uses to rank pages on SERPs.
On the other hand, Moz Domain Authority is relatively gaining momentum,
and the constant improvements are making it more and more accurate and
reliable. Who knows, in the coming months, DA might actually become a lot more important than PR?
Effect on SERPs
Although Google PR might not be given as much importance as DA in terms
of search ranking, Google PR still has some effect on the SERP, whereas
DA does not. This is probably why people still go for PR.
Another reason why PageRank is so popular is that, it is measured by
Google. There's a whole psychological effect related to it, and people
automatically tend to trust it. PR has been around for so long that
almost everyone now knows about it.
So what do you think about Domain Authority? Will it overtake PageRank,
or is Google too big to let that happen? Leave us with your responses in
the comments section below. And as always, feel free to ask any
questions
