Google’s 2022 Search Rating Guidelines demonstrate that quality content is paramount. An entire section explains how raters determine Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) for sites that can affect your money or your life ( YMYL ).
Google also recently announced an update dbtodata on spam links to “neutralize the impact of unnatural links on search results.”
In the past, it was easier to manipulate Authority Score with link schemes, ignoring the need for useful content. We now know that Google is placing more emphasis on content quality and expertise to determine the respectability of a site.
We have therefore decided to update our score to keep up with Google's current best practices regarding links and spam.
To learn more about how to use this metric in your link building efforts, read the Authority Score explanation .
To get a relevant and in-depth comparison, we conducted a comparative study taking into account 24,000 domains of different sizes and checked the scores of each domain with Moz and Ahrefs, in addition to the new data from Semrush.
Most of these domains scored similarly across all three tools. However, there were cases where Ahrefs and Moz overestimated or underestimated a domain’s reputation .
We noticed that these cases occurred when our competitors' tools did not take organic traffic and/or spam factors into account to provide a correct estimate. As a result, they gave unfairly high ratings to suspicious profiles or unfairly low ratings to sites with high organic traffic.
