As the leader in SEO information, Moz has helped countless SEOs fine-tune their strategy to provide real results for their clients. Recently, Moz released an upgrade to its domain authority to predict how well a website will rank in search engines when compared to competing websites over time. But with the release of Domain Authority 2.0, you may be wondering what that means for your website.

Domain authority has been a ranking signal for years and is generally considered the industry standard for measuring the strength of a domain in relation to its search engine ranking. This metric, based on a scale of 1 to 100, has splintered the SEO landscape with many SEOs claiming it creates confusion for those that don’t fully understand it. With Domain Authority 2.0 now in place, Moz has started to explain the changes and address some of the controversy surrounding it.

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At its most basic level, domain authority is often calculated based on several different factors, including backlinks, spam scores and other proprietary metrics that are compiled to provide a single score. As a comparative metric, it provides great insight for businesses that are attempting to research their competitors. While there are countless metrics that can predict how a website will rank, domain authority is often the most useful when predicting the ranking capability of a website.

With Domain Authority 2.0, there are a few distinct changes that SEOs are keeping an eye on including the training set, the training algorithm and the model factors. Moz is now monitoring more than 35 trillion links in an effort to distinguish quality links from those that are considered spam. Ultimately, the goal of this is to provide better insight into the quality of links that websites are receiving through the use of a proprietary Spam Score metric.

While a distinct drop in domain authority of up to 7% will be immediately noticeable, the long-term hope is that these scores will adjust rapidly and correct themselves under the new guidelines. This, in part, will be achievable through an improved link database that will be more frequently updated than its predecessor. However, improving this score will ultimately rely on the effort webmasters are willing to put into their website.

The primary goal of Domain Authority 2.0 is to give webmasters and SEOs insights into what steps they can take to improve their website’s performance. As an example, one website may have fewer rankings than a competitor although they have a higher domain authority score. In most cases, this would indicate that their content quality and quantity might need to be improved.

Although just one metric used to illustrate a website’s performance, domain authority shouldn’t be the primary focus of a successful website. Instead, creating a well-rounded plan that includes Page Authority, Keyword Difficulty, Keyword Opportunity, Keyword Volume, Rankings, CTR and local search best practices should be monitored and measured against as well. By not fixating on a sole metric, webmasters and SEOs will have a greater chance of success when attempting to improve a website or web page metric.