How To Raise Domain Authority

Improving Domain Authority & Off

Because the Domain Authority calculation primarily relies on backlinks, off-page SEO strategies like link building and digital PR are really the only way to elevate site authority metrics like DA.

Although improving on-page SEO will always be a worthwhile endeavor for improving your relevance and quality in the eyes of Google, on-page optimizations wont directly influence your DA like backlinks will.

However, with higher-quality content on your website, earning backlinks through off-site strategies will likely become far easier. In general with SEO, a multidisciplinary approach is likely to be more effective than relying on a single strategy on its own.

A Few Things To Keep In Mind

Now you are ready to increase your own sites domain authority. But before you do, there are a few things that you need to remember.

You Cant Fake Real Authority

At the end of the day, there is no way to fake real authority. The only way to increase your domain authority is do the work and build quality links.

This is Mozs premium metric and as I have said before, it is widely used in the SEO world to measure the overall rankability of sites.

If you dont want to build your own links, then have a link building agency do it for you:

• It will save you a ton of time and effort.
• Youll still get the results youre looking for.

The only thing you need to ensure is:

You can confidently trust the link building agency. You dont want them building spammy links that achieve nothing for your site or even worse

End up decreasing your sites domain authority.

Your Domain Authority Score Can Change At Any Time

Your own domain authority score accurately measures the ability of your site to rank in the SERPs. This means your sites DA score can change at any time.

Heres why:

We all know that rankings go up and down on a day to day basis. Thats just part of the SEO game.

There are tons of factors that can change the ranking positions of your site including:

• Algorithm updates and changes

What Is Good Domain Authority Score

Domain Authority is one of the most important metrics to measure when optimizing a website for SEO. A website with a high Domain Authority score will have a better chance of ranking higher in SERPs than a website with a low Domain Authority Score.

There are a number of factors that can influence a websites Domain Authority score, including the quality and quantity of the websites backlinks, the websites content, and the websites age.

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How To Check Domain Authority

Domain authority may seem complicated at first. Fortunately, checking the DA score for your own site is super easy. Just follow these four steps:

Its worth mentioning that while Moz created the domain authority metric, many other SEO tools have developed their own versions as well. For instance, Majestic has Site Explorer and Ahrefs has Domain Rating. You can use one of these tools instead, if you prefer.

Check And Improve Sites Health Via A Technical Site Audit

The first step to increase Domain Authority starts with a fundamental audit aimed at checking your websites SEO health. You never can be sure that some technical errors are not hiding under the surface. To detect any hidden problems, you will have to conduct an in-depth technical site audit.

This procedure involves an examination of different sites parameters and helps you optimize content architecture for search engines. The goal of the technical audit is to figure out what reduces your websites performance and doesnt correspond to Googles standards.

These are the most important components of a technical SEO audit that influence and help increase Domain Rating:

• Identifying crawl errors with a crawl report
• Checking HTTPS status codes
• Finding out the site load time
• Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly
• Checking XML sitemap status
• Checking for site-wide duplicate content
• Checking meta description length
• Searching for broken links

Using special SEO tools for this check-up, such as Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush, or any other, youll get an automatically formed report of what improvements and fixes you should do to help search engines process your website correctly.

Site audit report in Ahrefs

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Domain Rating By Ahrefs The Best Alternative

Most marketing tools have a similar product to Mozs domain authority. Ahrefs is arguably one of the best and most popular alternatives.

Its version of domain authority is called domain rating, but it serves the same general purpose.

However, its important to note that their algorithm differs so you should not expect the same score on both tools.

Regardless of whether you end up using domain authority, domain rating, or some other metric, the key is to look at where you are now, and how that is improving over time. This will give you a sense of whether or not your strategy is working. Remember though, rankings, traffic, and leads are all more important metrics to measure than domain authority or domain rating so focus on those first.

Domain Authority Versus Page Authority

Before we dig deeper into domain authority, we need to clarify: domain authority and page authority, another metric developed by Moz, are different. In the company’s own words:

“Whereas Page Authority measures the predictive ranking strength of a single page, Domain Authority measures the strength of entire domains or subdomains.”

In this article, we’ll focus on domain authority.

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Why Should You Care About Domain Authority

Business owners care about everything that has to do with their business. Every CEO, mom and pop shop, and affiliate marketer strives to be better than the competition.

Its not enough to be successful, they have to win. They have a need to be number one.

Have you ever met an entrepreneur that said they were fine with mediocrity? Maybe you have, but they are the overwhelming minority of the business world.

Metrics like domain authority and page authority give business owners an idea of how far they are from the top or at least a quick way to size up the competition. Marketing professionals, like SEOs, are there to help guide them the rest of the way.

As an example, lets say you own a jewelry store. Lots of people own jewelry stores, right? You often search for your business on Google but you are rarely on the first page of the search engine result pages.

You hear about Moz and sign up for a free trial to check your da score. Its abysmal. Horrendous even. Other websites are crushing the game and youre falling behind.

Its no wonder the competition is outpacing you! But what do you do now? You go to an SEO professional. Theyll help to educate you on what you can fix and what other people might need to fix for you. This is your first step to leveling up your company. Thats why you should care.

Realistic Ways To Increase Domain Authority For Google Search

If youve read anything about Search Engine Optimization , you already know that its essential to increase your domain authority. But how do you do that? And what, exactly, is domain authority?

It all started with PageRank, a Google measurement, or metric, dating back to 1997. PageRank is based on the number of links to a page, and the quality of the pages doing the linking. It was the thing that set Google apart from previous search engines, and for its time, it was revolutionary.

In 2000, Google introduced a toolbar for Internet Explorer that made it easier for Explorer users to search Google. The toolbar also displayed the Google PageRank for every page you visited, which was fine until spammers started using it to decide which sites were the best places to drop link spam.

It was the explosion of link spam that forced Google to remove public PageRank scores and endorse the nofollow tag. Using nofollow allowed website owners to negate the benefit of link spam. Apparently, though, no one sent spammers the memo, since you still see link spam in blog comments and forums.

Googles PageRank is still a part of their overall algorithm, but its only one signal of hundreds used. Its just not displayed publicly.

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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.

Analyse Your Competitors Sites To Understand Why They Get A Better Score

Noticed a few competitors have a higher DA score than you?

You can see why they have a higher score and even understand how to beat them by running a backlink analysis on your competitors.

Competitor backlink analysis is one of my favourite strategies in SEO. You basically get a road map into why your competitors are ranking ahead of you.

A backlink analysis will help you discover three important things:

To do my backlink analysis, I use Ahrefs.

Ahrefs has the largest link database of any SEO tool in the world second only to Google. With Ahrefs you can see every single link your competitors have.

Ready to get started with your competitor analysis? Then follow my backlink analysis guide.

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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

So Da Is Useless Then

No, but like any metric, you can’t use it recklessly or out of context. Our Domain Authority resource page dives into more detail, but the short answer is that DA is very good at helping you understand your relative competitiveness. Smart SEO isn’t about throwing resources at vanity keywords, but about understanding where you realistically have a chance at competing. Knowing that your DA is 48 is useless in a vacuum. Knowing that your DA is 48 and the sites competing on a query you’re targeting have DAs from 30-45 can be extremely useful. Likewise, knowing that your would-be competitors have DAs of 80+ could save you a lot of wasted time and money.

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Tip : Find A Niche To Produce Content For

Google tends to favor sites that consistently publish high-quality content about a particular subject. To that end, building up your expertise within a niche can pay dividends. It can keep your content focused, and save you from getting lost in the sauce as you juggle everything from keyword research to content creation all at once.

Find your niche by first considering your ideal customers. Who are they? What do they look like? What do they care about? What questions do they have regarding your line of expertise?

The answer to these questions can point you towards the core topics that you could write about. Once you have your main topics, you can then brainstorm subtopics and long-tail keywords to target.

Pro tip: Remember to keep your content strategy customer-centric, not keyword-centric. Occasionally, youll get an itch to post about a topic that seems pertinent to your customers, but doesnt necessarily have the keyword data to back it up.

For example, say that you sell a social media marketing tool and see a new social channel gaining traction in your industry. You check SEMRush for monthly search volumes but cant find search data on terms associated with that new channel. In this case, you may want to trust your gut and consider publishing content that your consumers may soon be looking for. Take the opportunity to establish yourself as an early adopter and a go-to expert of this new trend.

In 3 Easy Steps Check Page Authority

2. Enter a URL, for example, raysoftwaresolution.com/google-page-experience-guide/3. Check out your PA and other helpful SEO metrics

Source: Moz

Mozs Page Authority checker and Moz Domain Authority checker are just two of the many tools you have available. You should be able check Domain Authority and Page Authority in a similar and straightforward manner.

Lets now look at two important questions. What is a good domain authority? What is a good page authority? This information is needed to determine if your website is in a good SEO Domain Authority.

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How To Build Domain Authority And Leverage It

We want to emphasize that what makes a Domain Authority a good one? What is a good Page Authority? They are all the same. There is no standard for a good or excellent DA/PA. You evaluate your sites performance based on your competitive landscape. A high Moz Domain Authority can be a good thing because it increases your chances of ranking on the SERPs.

There are many factors that go into raising Domain Authority. But the main goal is to get links from other websites. It is important to build a strong backlink profile. This means increasing the number of links to your website, targeting high DA referring sites that can pass on link juice and ranking strength to your website, and driving traffic to your site simultaneously.

How to leverage DA or PA:

Analyze your historical Domain Authority. It is equally important to regularly check Domain Authority and to use historical Domain Authority to assess your year-over-2018 results. It is always beneficial to track your online performance.

Focus on pages with high Page Authority. You can optimize your pages with the highest Page Authority by reading any Moz Page Authority Explained article. Analyzing changes to your PA can help you determine how much link juice was passed to you by a domain.

Guest Posting On High Authority Sites

Guest posting is a link building strategy that has been around for years. But it is still an effective way to get links from high DA sites if you follow some best practices.

First, you have to avoid spammy sites that accept any guest post in exchange for a fee. Instead, look for quality sites with a high DA, an engaged audience, and real traffic.

Sometimes these sites will have a Write for Us or Contribute section on their website, but they often wont.

You then need to pitch quality articles that will genuinely add value for the websites readers. Instead of looking at it as a form of link building, you should approach the website as if you are a writer pitching an article.

Here are two examples of high DA sites that accept quality articles.

Hubspot

Hubspot is a DA 92 site that is actively looking for guest posts for its marketing, sales, service, and website blogs. The company knows that getting input from experts in the field is an excellent way to generate interesting posts for its audience.

But, the site has very high requirements for the type of post it allows on its blog. Its marketing blog has a long list of requirements. These state that it typically only accepts:

• Original experiment or analysis posts.
• Canonical posts that go into great depth on a particular topic.

Creating this type of content isnt easy. But if you can meet these editorial standards, you will get a valuable link from a DA 92 site – we’ve managed it before.

Entrepreneur

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Expand Social Media Presence

If we talk about reposts on social networks, then activity on social networks, especially on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +, will most likely positively impact your domains authority. If people share and talk about your articles, Google will consider it a vote of confidence. You can help strengthen your social media presence by making it easier to publish articles. Add the Like, Tweet, and + 1 buttons at the top of the article, use a social exchange plugin, such as Flare on your WordPress blog, or a plugin, such as Inline Tweet Sharer, to make it easier for people to quote you on Twitter.