May 31 2018
Moz’s new Link Explorer tool: What you need to know
Moz.com has recently announced that they are retiring the legacy link tool Open Site Explorer, replacing this with a new dataset called Link Explorer, coming on the 29th June.
What’s Changed?
Currently, Open Site Explorer, which has existed since 2008, is used to research backlinks, find link-building opportunities and discover potentially damaging, rank-impacting links. However Moz.com has improved upon many of the legacy problems that OSE has experienced with the new link explorer dataset:
Daily Updated Scores – no longer will you need to wait a month or two to see a new DA score or the links you built last week. Link Explorer updates every 24 hours with all the new links discovered that day, and gives website owners a new DA score each night allowing them to keep updated with their search engine optimisation.
Increased Dataset Index – The new Link Explorer dataset index is increasing by more than 20 times than the previous Open Site Explorer, meaning you still receive the same focus on high quality domains as OSE but with a huge increase of link coverage.
More Accurate Domain Grading – Domain authority appears to be much more accurate in Link Explorer, differentiating between a sub-domain and a root-domain.
How has the change impacted Domain Authority?
Many of the domains that had achieved 90-100 DA have been downgraded to a slightly lower score. These include bbc.co.uk, google.com, wix.com and more.
This is due to a much larger dataset being taken into consideration and this will result in a rise or fall in overall Domain Authority for your website.
Why is this happening?
Moz have expanded their dataset to try to correlate the rankings and strength that Google gives a link with their own data. This is to reflect the inflated Domain Authority that was previously given to sub-domains of self-hosted platforms such as Blogspot, Wix etc. Now, using Link Explorer DA, these sub-domains are graded at a much-lower Domain Authority reflective of their own backlinks.
How does this affect you?
Overall, this won’t mean too much for your website as Domain Authority is simply a scoring metric used to assess the power of a domain and is in no way, shape or form used by Google to influence their rankings algorithms. However, this will give you more visibility on the true authority of a website when conducting outreach campaigns.
What should I do if my Domain Authority has gone down?
In short, nothing. If you are continuing to concentrate on earning links through high quality content and outreach and promoting your website to high-authority domains, then your Domain Authority will continue to build over time to better reflect the links you have attracted.
