Russ Jones (@rjonesx) is the Principal Search Scientist at Moz. He joined Moz in 2015 after consulting for the company for years. Russ still does coding but the "real" engineers clean up his code for production.
Russ is responsible for the keyword search volume throughout the Moz products. He rebuilds the model on a monthly basis. Then he also works on product development and then a lot of research, the research part is what he loves the most.
We then talked about DA, domain authority, a metric Moz came up with that aims to predict how well a web site will rank in Google search. He explained how exciting it was to look at an index the way Google does and try to think more like Google in terms of ranking. We talked about the origins of DA, back when it was a LinkScape product. Earlier this year, the DA scores were updated and he explained what changed there. He explained how easy it was for his team to pick up on those who tried to manipulate the DA scores. Moz is now working on improving the Page Authority algorithm, which is a better score for that purpose he said.
We spent a bit of time discussing some of the controversy in the SEO industry around DA. In fact, his own Twitter bio and header graphic says "Google doesn't use DA."
Local Market Analytics is Moz’s latest new software product they released at Mozcon. He spent a bit of time talking about it, you can learn more about this new product over here.
Russ says he loves arguing in online discussion forums, so you can find him there, mostly on Reddit.
Here is the video, I hope you like it:
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Forum discussion at YouTube.
