What Goes Into Domain Authority
You can look up your site in tools like MozRank to see what your domain authority is. However, every tool uses a different algorithm. Some tools put more emphasis on backlinks and the quality of the sites that use your links.
The number of unique backlinks can also be part of the equation. Some sites have multiple backlinks to the same site or content producer. But if there are various sites linking back to your content and site, youre likely to get a higher score.
Backlinks are when someone else uses your site or content as a reference. Sometimes links can just refer back to your site or use it as an example.
Focus On Link Building
Link building is the first thing that you should focus on when it comes to domain authority, because this is a big quality signal that Google looks at. If plenty of other great and high-authority sites are linking to you, after all, it means that they trust you and think you have something to offer. Google notices this.
If you havent already, the best place to start is to run a backlink audit, which will show you your current backlink profile. It will also flag any potential harmful backlinks youll want to remove . I like SEMrushs tool, but there are others that you can using, including Moz.
While looking at your backlink profile, take note of not just how many links you have, but which sites theyre coming from. Check those sites domain authorities online are any of them high enough to give you a boost? Over 50 is good, but 70+ is outstanding.
As youre looking at your backlink profile, consider how you can expand upon it. Creating great content on your site through blogs is always a good start, because it gives people something that they can link to.
Dive Deeper:How And Why To Build A Backlink Portfolio
Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile Friendly
Having a mobile-friendly website is no longer optional or nice to have but its mandatory.
Here are a few reasons:
- Mobile searches are now more than desktop .
- Most users start their search on mobile and then continue on Desktop
- Mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor
- Google is working on a mobile-first index and websites that are not mobile-friendly will simply not be included
- Not having a mobile-friendly version of your website , has a negative impact on your overall Domain Authority Score.
If your website is not mobile-friendly yet, the best way to start is to go to Googles Mobile-Friendly Test and run the test for your domain.
Google will give you a nice report with recommendations on how to make your website mobile-ready.
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X Tips To Increase Your Domain Authority
Even though we know that increasing your domain authority will not necessarily translate to higher search rankings, lots of people still want to increase it.
Domain authority is purely based on your websites backlink profile so you need to focus your efforts here.
Each of these four tips will help you attract and build quality links that will increase your domain authority.
Copy What They Do Best To Improve Your Domain Authority
Once you have done a backlink analysis on your competitors, its time to use that information to improve your own websites domain authority.
Yes, you heard that right.
You simply want to copy whats working for your competitors and apply it to your own site. This is the fastest and most sure way of improving your domain authority.
Basically, you will take your competitors top links and go and steal those exact links.
If they came from a:
- Go and make a comment on that same blog
- Forum post Join the discussion and link where its relevant
- Guest post Pitch your own content to that website
Your competitors have done all of the hard work. Now you just need to go out and copy them. There is simply no need to reinvent the wheel in this case.
Follow this guide if you want to learn how I steal and copy my competitors link-building strategies.
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How Do I Increase My Domain Authority
The Short Version: Don’t obsess over Domain Authority for its own sake. Domain Authority shines at comparing your overall authority to other sites and determining where you can compete. Attract real links that drive traffic, and you’ll improve both your Domain Authority and your rankings.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, over a rock, or really anywhere rock-adjacent, you may know that Moz has recently invested a lot of time, research, and money in a new-and-improved Domain Authority. People who use Domain Authority naturally want to improve their score, and this is a question that I admit we’ve avoided at times, because like any metric, DA can be abused if taken out of context or viewed in isolation.
I set out to write a how-to post, but what follows can only be described as a belligerent FAQ …
Editor’s note: Want to check your own Domain Authority? Use Link Explorer to check DA, PA, and more. You can also see Domain Authority metrics using the MozBar, in your Moz Pro campaigns, and various other Moz Tools.
Domain Authority Score Meanings
Domain authority scores can range between poor and excellent. High-ranking domains like CNN, Microsoft etc. tend to have excellent scores. Anything below 30 is considered poor. Between 30 and 40 is below average and between 40 and 50 is an average score. A score between 50 and 60 is good, while a score between 60 and 70 is very good. Anything above 80 is excellent. You should strive for domain authority scores that are at or above your competitors. Say youre a major wireless service carrier. Your sites domain authority should be on par with the other major carriers.
But if youre a regional wireless carrier, comparing yourself to the big four carriers will set you up for disappointment. Its unrealistic to think that a smaller carrier will reach the ranks of national ones. You should look at the SERPS for direct competitors.
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What Is Domain Authority And Why Does It Matter
When someone enters the search term tips to paint the exterior of my house, there are likely thousands of relevant pages that are targeting that keyword phrase, and Google has to decide which page they want to show first.
Because the search engine giant wants to increase the likelihood that the user has a great experience, itll look for content relevance as well as sites that have a history of producing valuable, trusted content along those lines.
This is where domain authority comes in. Your brand new mom-and-pop painting company will struggle to compete against a huge chain like Lowes for similar keywords, all else being equal.
Domain authority is not a metric that Google uses when compiling their ranking order for the SERPs, but it is a gauge of how well you can expect to perform there against your competitors. , this metric will give you a number from 1-100 that tells you how trusted your site is by Google, and therefore how likely you are to rank well.
Increasing your domain authority score will often correlate with more potential to do well in the SERPs, though it will have no impact on what your competitors are doing.
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Da Or Pa Which Is More Important
To put it simply, increasing DA takes longer to operate. If you keep irrigating and persevere, one day your efforts will turn into results and bring you more traffic.
If you are not planning to hire an SEO expert and want to optimize by yourself, you need to consider DA as a long-term goal.
If you only focus on the ranking of a certain page, this will make you lose more traffic that has the opportunity to convert.
Conversely, if it only targets DA and not PA, will it cause any harm? Not really! This is a feasible long-term optimization strategy, which is very helpful for building a brand image. And while DA is improving, it can also help the page rank higher and easier to expose.
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Make Sure That Your Website Is Mobile
A huge number of online users access the web through mobile devices. If your website hasnt been optimized for mobile use yet, then youre way behind.
Not only will it hurt your mobile search engine rankings, but youll lose out on a lot of visitors who will simply leave your site once they realize that its not being properly displayed on their smartphone or tablet.
To check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not, you can visit this page. It will analyze your web page and let you know how mobile-friendly your site is.
It is important to have a mobile-friendly site now because more users are surfing the Net with their smartphones.
How Does Google Actually Do It
However, Google only covers a part of the entire Internet because the Googlebot has no access to the full content range. Either because it doesnt know its there, because its not relevant enough for resources to be spent on it or for numerous other reasons.
From this crawled content, Google again only uses a selection for its link index. Google is very good at not rating unnatural links. Disallow files are also evaluated, the numerous versions of nofollow attributes are taken into account and more.
The take-away: we dont know how big the internet is. We also do not know which part of it is recorded by Google. We know even less about which of the indexed links are used by Google for ranking.
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Domain Authority: What You Really Need To Know
So what do site owners or digital marketers actually need to know about Domain Authority?
If your main goal is to simply earn new customers from search, it isnt mandatory to understand the ins and outs of this calculation. However, Domain Authority has loads of direct applications to crafting a successful SEO strategy. Here are the most important things to understand about this site authority metric.
Is A Low Domain Authority Score Bad
Having a low Domain Authority isnt bad. All sites start with a low DA before they have attracted any links. The only exception is when a site is built on an existing domain that already has links pointing to it.
There are plenty of low Domain Authority sites that rank for low competition keywords that bring in traffic. If you also want to rank low competition keywords, increasing your websites DA might not be a priority.
For example, the site below has a DR of just 1.9 yet receives 1000s of visitors every month, according to Ahrefs.
There are also plenty of examples of high Domain Authority sites that are bad or spammy.
Websites built on expired domains or those that have suffered from a Google penalty can have high domain scores while being low-quality and having little traffic.
When assessing whether a website is good or bad, you should look at other factors as well as DA. Consider whether the site ranks on Google has much organic SEO traffic, a unique design, or publishes high-quality, unique content.
We looked at this issue in greater detail in a recent article.
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How Can I Check My Domain Authority
On Moz, you can check your websites Domain Authority for free through Link Explorer. You just need to enter your domains root URL and your webpages Domain Authority score will appear automatically.
The digital tool provides other features, as well such as the number of unique external linking domains , the number of unique pages linking to a page , and the total number of keywords for which this website is ranking within the top 50 positions on Google , among other metrics.
What Contributes To Domain Authority
Whilst domain authority exists as a single metric, a number of factors contribute towards it. It is thought these number more than 40 in total but no search engine has ever confirmed these in full. However, we can say with a fair degree of certainty that the most significant factors include the following:
- Volume of backlinks The quantity of backlinks to your content enhances the perceived authority your content has in the eyes of search engines. The more people that cite your content, the more likely it is of good quality and relevant.
- Quality of backlinks Gaining backlinks from other high-authority domains confers a degree of authority to your own website. Not all backlinks are equal and certainly some are more valuable than others.
- Social signals One of the more controversial aspects is the impact of social signals. Whilst this does not have a direct impact on your domain authority, the additional traffic driven from social media platforms improves click through rate that in-turn improves domain authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines.
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Check Your Own Domain Authority Score
Checking your own domain authority score is really easy.
Moz allows you to do it completely free on their website through their domain analysis tool. Head over to the Moz domain analysis page. Now type in your domain and .
Moz will quickly analyse your domain and give you your DA rating. You can even do this with your competitors to see how they stack up against you,
What Is Website Authority
Website authority is a metric from SEO tool providers. It measures the relative strength of a sites backlink profile compared to every other site in their index.
Pretty much every major SEO tool has this metric, but its name and the way its calculated differs in each one.
At Ahrefs, our website authority metric is Domain Rating .
Like most other website authority metrics, it runs on a scale from 0-100.
Now, its essential to understand that the scale for Domain Rating is logarithmic. That means its much more challenging to go from DR 69-70 than 9-10.
A good way to visualize this is to think about rankings in a video game.
Maybe you start as a Scout, and it might take you a few hours to gain your Ranger badge. But jumping to the next level could take months, and only truly dedicated players will ever get to Epic status.
The logarithmic scale also means that a DR 20 site is more than twice as authoritative as a DR 10 site.
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Be Present On Industry Portals
Next on the list should be building your presence on industry specific portals.
This activity is part of directory listing, just that I focussed on SaaS and Startup focussed directories, thats why a separate category.
These include some well-known portals like AngelList, Crunchbase, Beta Pages, etc. and some not so well known portals like Listly, BrownBook, etc.
Again, you shouldnt list on these portals to just get a backlink .
Idea is to build a presence on portals where businesses like yours exist. Afterall, you are known by the company you keep.
The real motive to get listed is that these portals have high rankability on Google. That means an SEO boost, especially for your brand related keywords.
Additionally, platforms like BetaBound offer beta testers for free. Now thats a jackpot.
Heres a list of 38 such Saas and Startup portals where you can get yourself listed .
This step can be interchanged or combined with Step #2. But if you have just started, let it be the 3rd step. By the time you start with SaaS based listings, you might have a beta product to show to your audience.
Just make sure you are not overdoing anything.
Maintain a fixed run rate so that your link building speed can be sustained.
How Do You Check Your Domain Authority
There are several link authority tools out there. How do you know which one is right for you?
SEO Review Tools has a basic domain authority checker. It looks at authority and content.
Other metrics measured by this tool include website age and social media score. Your social media score relates to how active your social profiles are and how many shares your content receives.
Page authority is also measured. This metric is like DA, except it looks at a specific page rather than entire sites. Page authority is also calculated on a one to 100 logarithmic scale.
If you want to check several sites at once,Linkgraphs Free Bulk DA Checker may be the perfect option. This tool allows you to check DA and spam metrics for up to 10 URLs at a time.
If you want to check even more domains, Rankzs SEO Rank Tracker lets you check hundreds at once. They also offer a backlinks checker, backlinks monitor, and domain availability checker.
Moz has a comprehensive free domain SEO analysis tool. It showcases top pages by links, discovered and lost links, top linking domains, and keywords by estimated clicks. Of course, you can also find some of this information using Ubersuggest as well.
For example, when you search for the DA of neilpatel.com on Moz, its revealed it is 88, and there are 69,900 linking domains . There are also over 269,000 keywords for which the site ranks, and the spam score just 1%.
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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