How Is Moz Domain Authority Calculated
There are several factors that Moz uses to calculate DA, but the most significant is the inbound links pointing to your domain, also known as backlinks.
Moz gathers this information from its constantly updated Link Explorer index. Sites with more backlinks and unique referring domains are more likely to have higher DA scores.
You can read all about the math behind Domain Authority in Mozs Authority Scoring Guide. But to keep it as simple as possible, its all about your backlink profile.
What Are Domain Authority And Domain Rating
Lets start with the definition. What is Domain Authority? This term was developed by Moz, one of the largest SEO service providers worldwide, with the purpose of helping businesses determine what positions their site will take on SERPs. Thus, its a critical search engine ranking factor.
Domain Authority indicator varies from 1 to 100. The higher the score is, the better chances for a site to rank are. You may use the Domain Authority metric to assess your overall SEO efforts and compare the strength of your website to the competitors resources.
Moz also distinguishes another term, Page Authority as a part of the ranking system. Page Authority means a value that search engines assign to a certain web page. Dont get confused here! Whereas PA estimates the ranking potential of a single page, Domain Authority assesses the strength of an entire site.
Meanwhile, Ahrefs, Mozs larger competitor, came up with a similar concept but named it Domain Rating . The DR is designed to determine the overall strength of a websites backlink profile in terms of its size and quality.
Domain Authority and Domain Rating are key metrics that businesses use to analyze and assess the outcomes of their SEO strategies. Consider working on increasing these scores if you want to improve your sites rankings. Remember that developing authority takes time, a lot of time. So dont give up if you dont see the growth immediately.
The Number Of Sites Each Referring Domain Links To
Lets say that you build two followed links: one from The Guardian and one from IMDB. Both of these sites have identical DR scores, but which link would increase your Domain Rating the most?
Answer: It depends on the number of sites they each link to with at least one followed link. The more unique websites a site links to, the less so-called DR equity it can pass.
So, lets check the Linked Domains report for each site and filter for followed links only.
It looks like The Guardian links to around 50x more sites than IMDB . Therefore, the link from IMDB would increase your Domain Rating more than the one from The Guardian.
Lets look at how big of a difference this can make to DR.
This website has one referring domain, which is IMDB. Its DR score is 34.
This website also has one referring domain, but this time its The Guardian. Its DR score is 1.5.
Its crucial to note that this doesnt make all links from IMDB more authoritative than links from The Guardian. There are a lot of factors that contribute to a good backlink.
You May Like: Transfer From Wix To Shopify
Is Domain Rating A Ranking Factor
Domain authority score is an indicator of the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. But its not a ranking factor.
Its a third-party metric that measures factors Google puts importance on for determining rankings.
The metric predicts the impact of your link-building efforts but doesnt determine the success.
For instance, you can artificially boost your authority metric by spamming bad PBN links to your site.
However, Google will easily detect this as malicious, and you likely wont rank for any target keywords.
Increase Your Social Signals
Although officially Google has many times stated that social signals are not part of the Google Ranking algorithm, there is a clear coloration between pages that rank high on Google and social signals.
Pages that are popular in Google tend to have many likes, shares, and tweets.
For the purpose of increasing your domain authority what you need to do is:
- To work on your Facebook business page and try to increase your followers
- To make sure that you have an active social media presence in some of the social networks so that the content you share will get some traction
- To ensure that you have a social media button on your pages to make it easy for readers to share your content
- To check that your content looks good when shared using the social sharing buttons
Don’t Miss: Gulftel Webmail Login
Getting Links From Various Domains Is Better Than Getting Links From The Same Domain
In other words, you should try to get links from as many different domains as possible getting links from the same domain wont help you move the needle.
This isnt to say that getting links from the same domain isnt important on the contrary.
But, when it comes to your DR, you wont notice any actual difference unless you have a diversified link profile.
Go Hard On Technical Seo
Obviously, you need to improve on all aspects of SEO if you are keen on growing your domain authority.
Technical SEO is aimed at optimizing the workings of the complete website for the sake of search engine crawling, indexing and general visibility.
As the name implies, a measure of technical knowledge is required. However, the good news is that for the most part, once you get your technical SEO on lock, you wont have to do it again.
Security is one core facet of technical SEO. You should add SSL to your site to make it HTTPS. This means that your site can only be accessed with https and not http.
The big deal with HTTPS?
It helps with search engine ranking, and also develops trust with your users. It shows that any information transferred between your site and the server is encrypted, and thus protected from malicious eyes.
If youve ever made a purchase online, then you know how relevant this is.
Recommended Reading: How To Determine Who Owns A Domain
A New Da Is Coming Shortly From Moz
Russ Jones, Principal Search Scientist at Moz recently announced that they are introducing a new domain authority algorithm in the month of March, 2022.
Moz is working on delivering a better and more relevant domain authority metrics which removes spam, improves correlations, and most importantly, update Domain Authority relative to all the changes that Google makes.
After the new DA release, your website DA might fluctuate. We cant say whether the DA changes will fluctuate by a huge margin or not. So lets wait for their new DA update from Moz.
So when is the new DA update happening?
To be precise, on March 5th 2019, you can get the latest DA updates.
You can check your own site along with your competitor sites DA to see how relevant and effective the new DA change from Moz is.
Dont fret about the new DA changes if your websites DA rankings go down as its not a legitimate or accurate search metric which actually doesnt determine your Google rankings.
Ready To Increase Your Domain Authority
By now, you should have realized that improving your websites Domain Authority is essential to get organic traffic from search engines like Google.
Since the SEO world is almost certain that Google also has a similar metric that calculates a websites authority, caring about your websites DA is inevitable.
If youre ready to start increasing your websites domain authority, then youll need to start acquiring high-quality links from websites that are relevant to your own.
One of the best ways to do this is by doing email outreach to those websites.
If youre ready to get started with link building outreach, then you should give Respona a try.
Our tool has helped many new websites improve their authority and their overall rankings.
Just request access to a free demo and well be glad to show you what Respona can do for you.
Don’t Miss: What To Do After Buying A Domain
Q10 Does Domain Authority Matter
Domain authority matters, but you shouldnt be obsessed over it. If, for example, you have low-quality content published on your website, poor user experience for your visitors, or the links youve acquired come from low-quality websites, then having a high domain authority wont really help you get more search traffic.
What Kind Of Servers And Developers Does It Take To Do This Stuff
Its a major technical challenge to measure the authority of every site on the internet. We asked Matt about the human and technical resources that go into it
|
Running and maintaining the Mozscape index takes a large team of developers and many servers. In addition to the servers used to build the Mozscape index and compute Domain Authority, we have dedicated servers used for crawling, creating a crawl schedule, serving the Mozscape API and a rather impressive number of hard disks and servers just dedicated to storing all the data! Matthew Peters, Director of Data Science, MOZ |
Recommended Reading: Vistaprint Domain Transfer
Why Worry About Da
Domain authority is important when trying to get your site to rank against your competitors. The key phrase here is âagainst your competitors.â This means that if your competitors all have scores in the 20s, then you donât need to shoot for a score in the 80s, but rather just one higher than your competitors.
You can always pay to be at the top, using PPC, but in the long run, you will want to organically get your site to rank higher. To do this you can use the DA to analyze the backlinks of your competitors and aim to make yours better. You should be trying to attract higher quality sites to link to yours.
Tip: Focus On Your Users Experience Not Your Da Score
Its important to note that despite these being the most obvious areas to focus your energies on, they may not work for every website. Domain authority scores are influenced by over 40 different ranking factors. And its the combination of all of these which determine your score.
Instead of trying to focus solely on improving your domain score, I would instead advise that you focus on improving your websites usability for visitors.
At the end of the day, its your audience that will determine how well your pages rank. Once you start to shift your energies to improving their user experience, youll start noticing a difference. As youll be unknowingly improving your overall ranking potential.
What does this mean?
Well, it means doing everything you can to improve the experience for those coming to and spending time on your website.
Not only does this mean creating quality, relevant content which addresses their needs. But it also means ensuring your website is properly optimised for SEO. As a result, a site users journey from start to finish will run smoothly.
Don’t Miss: What Is The .io Domain
Keywords Are Part Of On
Hardly ever is there talk about on-page SEO without mention of the term keywords.
In fact, many think that SEO is just all about keywords. It isnt, but keywords are important if you are concerned about growing your domain authority and boosting your sites visibility.
Keywords should be smoothly added to a pages content so that it flows naturally. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing. Worse still, Google penalizes sites that are guilty of it. Therefore, keywords should be cleverly spread throughout the text, and even included in the image alt texts.
Get Links From Growing Websites
As the sites that link to you improve their DR, so does the benefit given by the link. It can be beneficial to gain links from sites that are in their early stages but growing.
If you get the chance to receive a link from a site that appears to be growing but still has a low DA, then it could be worth doing so rather than going for one with a slightly higher DA but less potential.
Of course, getting both will be most beneficial, but may not be possible on a limited budget.
Use a tool like Ahrefs to see how a websites backlink profile is growing over time. If the site shows a growing trend, it could be a sign that it will continue increasing into the future.
Don’t Miss: Io Domain Name Meaning
How To Check Domain Authority And Page Authority
Moz created an online Domain Authority checker, Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool, that reveals your DA and other useful SEO metrics, such as your top pages by links, top-linking domains and top-ranking keywords.
Enter a domain, for example, thriveagency.com View your DA and other useful SEO metrics
Source: Moz
Moz also created an online Page Authority tool called Link Explorer. This allows you to inspect individual URLs for your PA, DA, linking domains, top-followed links to your site and more.
How To Increase Domain Authority
As you start to work on boosting your websites domain authority, you should remember that its a long-term strategy. Here are some ways you can increase your sites DA:
1. Acquire High-Quality Backlinks from Authority Sites
If you noticed, backlinks play a huge role in calculating domain authority. Not only that, backlinks are one of the two most important ranking factors.
A study by Ahrefs showed that 55.24% of websites dont get any organic traffic since they dont have any backlinks.
Therefore, its safe to say that you need backlinks and high-quality ones.
There are tons of ways you can get backlinks to strengthen your link profile. To start, you can look at your top referral sources and then find similar sites for backlink opportunities.
And to uncover your top inbound link sources, you can use MonsterInsights. Its the and shows you detailed reports on your dashboard.
You can also ethically spy on your competitors, look at their backlink sources and then try to acquire links from the same websites. Another easy way of securing links from high-quality websites is through guest posting.
For more details, follow our 15 actionable tips on how to get backlinks.
2. Create Killer Content Thats Link Worthy
The second way to increase your domain authority is by creating great content thats link-worthy. Why should your content be amazing?
And with links from different sites, youll also boost your root domains. All of which will contribute towards securing a high DA.
Read Also: How Much Does It Cost To Own A Domain
Q7 Does Google Use Domain Authority
Even though Google states that it doesnt have a metric such as the website authority or domain authority, many professional SEO services argue that Google has an authority metric thats similar to the ones SEO software like Ahrefs or Moz are using. If theres such a metric, we expect it to be calculated in a much more sophisticated way and take into account several different factors for each websites performance.