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MOZ Page/Domain Authority Error

It started off like every other night; my brother and I were exchanging SEO related tips. Our nightly conversation consisted of the numerous PBN's that were recently taken down. PBN's used to be the way, black-hat-way, to rank sites quick and dirty. Google caught on and started cracking down on the thousands of PBN's in existence. Certain people still claim that they work, and I don't doubt it, but the fame is short-lived. The potential of having your site banned is not worth the risk.

I was showing him a blog that I recently started. it showed a MOZ PA of 77 and a DA of 92. I knew that the content I was writing was good and I'm sure people are sharing it, but for it to show a PA of 77 was suspicious after the blog being up for a month. A quick Google search showed that all Blogspot accounts were ranked at 77. We searched further and saw that all Tumblr accounts had a PA of 94!

After browsing through numerous different forums, we couldn't find any additional information. We figured that this was MOZ's way of combating PBN, but we couldn't figure out how this made any sense. So I emailed them. The MOZ team responded promptly. I thought I'd share their response.

My Email
I've noticed that all of the tumblr accounts have a PA of 94 and all blogspot accounts have a PA of 77. Is there a fault in the MOZ toolbar? If not, will Google start to discredit the MOZ PA/DA rankings?

MOZ Response
"Sorry this data is looking a bit wonky!

This is a bit of a mistake on the part of Open Site Explorer. We ran into some trouble with our most recent index where around 10,000 sites got blacklisted as being spam, only some of which were actually spam. Some pretty big sites ended up on that list by mistake, like Etsy.com and blogspot.com, and tumblr. We had to backfill some data so that our tools would still function properly, but unfortunately we weren't able to fix the metrics for all of the sites, and it looks like tumblr and blogspot's metrics are still a little off-kilter.

The reason you're seeing a PA of 94 or 77 for these pages, and on all tumblr.com pages is that our tool is assigning the Page Authority of tumblr's main page to all internal timblr pages. This should be fixed with the release of our next index, but for now you won't see any link data for this page, and the Page Authority will be artificially held at 94. Sorry about that!

It is important to note that Google doesn't take these numbers in account when determining rankings (as far as I know). These numbers are just our best guess on how likely a site or a page is to rank based on the sites that actually rank in the search engines.

I hope this helps to clear things up! Please let me know if I can help you with anything else."

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