Does Blocking Bots on your PBN Sites Prevent DA/PA From Increasing?

I was checking out the competition for a new niche I am considering entering. I checked the Domain Authority and Page Authority of the Top 5 sites, and they all had very low metrics and only a couple of backlinks. None of the links were PBNs. This seemed strange to me, as I figured this would have been a much more competitive niche (lots of $$$ to be made).

So my question is, could these sites all be using PBNs to rank but have bots blocked by plugins such as Spyder Spanker or Link Privacy? Would that cause them to rank high on page 1, even with low site metrics? Or does using PBN links still increase your DA/PA metrics regardless?

I think if Moz cannot crawl the PBN then it will not see the outgoing link to your money site and therefore PA/DA will not increase. Same goes for Majestic TF.

It's obviously hard to say without looking at it that's exactly what's going on, but yeah - if Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz don't know about the links their metrics won't rise.

Ahh okay, that makes sense. Haha I was thinking that outranking these guys would be a piece of cake, but they may very well be ranking with PBNs anyways. Guess I will just start testing and see what it takes to rank in this niche.

Don't focus too much on PA/DA, they are worthless metrics that can be manipulated very easily.

Yes, I know that PA/DA by themselves are pretty useless. It is relatively simple to artificially pump these metrics up with spam.

I just wasn't sure if the inverse is true... that is, can a site have very low PA/DA but still have some powerful PBN or other backlinks behind it. Thanks for the clarification.

Metrics created by companies rely on their bots crawling the sites for information. If blocked it will change the outcome of the report. Then it's a judge based on PR and that metric is hidden from the public.