Why Is Link Building Important To Your Business
Link building is critical for improving online visibility, helping you appear higher on SERPs, and making it easier for your target audience to find you. Google wants to deliver the best results for its users. High authority backlinks inform Google that your site and content are relevant, high-quality, and trustworthy.
High authority domain backlinks arent as easy to get as backlinks from low authority sites. However, these are more than worth the time investment. If your competitors have a better page ranking, the ability to outrank them might revolve around having more backlinks from high-authority domains.
Why Is Measuring Domain Authority Useful
With the help of a domain authority checker, you can numerically measure your sites domain authority, on a scale of 0 to 100. Why is this useful?
For starters, its a good indicator of the overall health of your SEO campaign. Your domain authority can increase thanks to better on-site content, more inbound links and other factors, so if you see your DA ticking upward, its a good sign youre doing things right.
Additionally, its a useful measure for competitive analysis. Understanding that your top competitor has a higher domain authority than you can help you identify some of the specific tactics that set them apart. It can also help you determine when its worth fighting a competitor for a contentious keyword phrase, and when it might be wiser to back off.
What Supports Domain Authority As A Metric
Over the years and as the study of SEO has deepened, leading authorities on the subject have come to understand what impacts website rankings.
Beyond basic web optimization issues, some specific factors have a direct influence on a domains authority.
Most notably, we can consider the total number of links to a site and their quality .
There are other additional factors, but Moz is not so clear about what they are.
The fact is that, so far, this metric has proven to be very close to what reality brings. Sites with good DA usually rank well in Googles SERP.
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How To Improve Domain Authority
Increasing the domain authority on your site starts with taking a look at the links that you have coming in. Various backlink SEO tools can help you analyze your link profile and see which links lead to your site and their importance. Youll also be able to check out who is linking to your competitors, a powerful insight into whats going on in the industry.
After determining your links, ask yourself the following questions:
If you spot any broken links, reach out to the sites to make sure theyre updated or removed. Youll also want to build a plan to bring in new links from authoritative sources. One great way to start is to create a link building plan with quality backlinks to other sites so that theyll have a reason to feature you.
How Often Will Your Domain Authority Score Gets An Update
According to Moz, they update their DA metrics in real-time as links are being recognized. In relation to this is their link analysis data whereby the Moz Mozscape Index is updated every 3 to 4 weeks, which is the time you should check for your DA after you have made any updates to your website.
The following are the 9 steps that you should follow to increase domain authority, from the very beginning of your sites creation:
Check out this video for a quick summary!
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How To Improve Your Domain Rating
Getting backlinks from more unique websites is the only way to improve your website’s Domain Rating score.
But improving your site’s “authority” should never be your primary goal.
You should instead focus on earning backlinks from strong pages on reputable sites in your industry to the pages that you want to rank in Google. That’s because there’s a clear correlation between the number of referring domains to a page and the amount of organic traffic it gets.
Furthermore, we found that the number of referring domains to a page is the strongest correlating backlink factor as far as rankings are concerned.
How Do You Get A High Da Score
Its impossible to fully understand the methodology behind DA scores because theyre based on algorithms. However, they are a prediction of how well the domain will do. What we do know is that high-quality links pointing to your site are always a positive signal for search engines, so its worth it to build more of these backlinks and disavow bad links. Learn more about the different kinds of links in this post.
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How To Apply Domain Authority To Seo Work
- Comparative analysis. Since domain authority is a comparative tool, it can be helpful to compare your score to those of the domains youre directly competing within search results. If your competitor has a higher score than you, then you will want to consider ways to increase your score, thereby increasing your chances of ranking higher in search results than your competitors.
- Improve or increase content. If you know you have a lower DA score, then you may want to focus your efforts on creating more or better content. When you have high-quality content, its more likely other websites will link to it, which in turn boosts your domain authority .
- Check the value of referring sites. If you analyze the websites sending links to your website, then you want to make sure only high-quality sites are pointing to you. One way to ensure quality is by checking that sites DA score.
- Evaluate link outreach efforts. Are there websites you want to be sending links to your website, like an educational or news site? Before you do, you canand shouldcheck their DA scores as a proxy for how well their pages rank in search. The higher the domain authority, the more likely their links will boost your domain authority as a natural result.
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Can Moz Domain Authority Score Decrease
In SEO, nothing is constant unless you make consistent improvements.
Likewise, Domain Authority is also subjected to changes.
However, this depends on a few factors, including how the machine learning model of Moz treats the quality of the links coming to the website.
So, letâs say your website has a DA of 50, and this is based on the DA of 900 different domains that are linking to your website.
If the Moz algorithm finds a high spam score for 400 of these websites, thereâs a chance that your DA may fluctuate along with theirs.
This happened in 2019 whenMoz decided to revamp the core algorithm that determines the DA score.
After the Domain Authority update, a lot of websites felt a fluctuation in their DA.
Many complained of a massive drop.
When analyzed, the sites that lost the DA were mostly getting link backs from low-quality sites.
Here are the reasons why the Domain Authority Might Reduce according to Moz:
- Your link profile growth has not been captured in the web index.
- High-authority sites experienced significant link growth, skewing the scaling process.
- We crawled more or fewer of your linking domains than we previously had.
- You earned links from places that do not contribute to Google ranking.
- Your Domain Authority is on the low end of the scoring spectrum and is more impacted by scaling fluctuation.
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What Tools Can I Use To Get My Da Score
DA scores are available in the following Moz tools and features:
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Link Explorer – a backlink analysis tool
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MozBar – a free chrome extension
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Keyword Explorer – in the SERP Analysis Section
Here are a few items to keep in the back of your mind when evaluating and working on your DA score.
Do. Use DA as a comparative metric between sites of a similar caliber, category or industry,
Dont. Dont look at your sites Domain Authority score in isolation.
Do. Look to see how your competitors DA scores fluctuated in light of any updates.
Dont. Dont mistake Mozs 0-100 for an F-A grading. You should not be aiming for 100 to get an A. You should really be aiming for a score that is higher than your direct competitors .
Do. Expect regular fluctuations in your DA score as both your sites link profile and the rest of the web change over time.
Dont. Dont mistake DA for PageRank. DA was created by Moz, and Google doesnt factor the score into your sites ranking.
Building A High Authority Domain Backlinking Strategy
It used to be acceptable to use black hat techniques, such as buying backlinks in large quantities. Nowadays, those kinds of tactics will see you penalized by Google. That means you need to earn your backlinks from high-authority domains, and this can be challenging.
Start with a backlink audit check all of your current backlinks and filter the results by page. The best link checking sites and programs require payment, but Ahrefs has a free version that gives you access to a massive amount of information.
Determine the quality of your existing backlinks. Then, begin building more high-quality ones.
There are multiple guides available to walk you through the process and highlight the tools you should use.
Create awesome and unique industry-relevant content that showcases your leadership and is very visible online. That means joining forums, networking, involving yourself in industry conversations, and posting on your social media pages. When your content is unique and high-quality, youre going to end up with links.
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Where Does The Name Moz Come From
Moz, formerly SEOmoz, has a name that was inspired by organizations like DMOZ, Mozilla, and Chefmoz all companies that strove for engaging their communities with openness and integrity. From the very beginning, we felt passionately about bringing that same integrity to the frustratingly opaque SEO industry.
Rand Fishkin
To Infinity And Beyond
With SEO more important than ever, in 2016 we made a difficult but necessary decision to reverse our expansion into inbound marketing, shifting our strategy back to what we know best: search. We’re making dramatic improvements to our core products, Moz Pro and Moz Local, and continue to push for transparency and a clear understanding of an otherwise complex field. Did we mention we’re also hiring?
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Blog Comments And Backlinks
Organically representing yourself and writing relevant content on blog comments can be extremely valuable, but it is a high-risk backlinking strategy. Google may penalize you if you post too many that contain a link to your pages or content. Be sparse with this and aim for high-quality links for the best results, but it can depend on the level of competition. Consider these important factors when building quality blog backlinks:
- Avoid having more than 50+ comments with links.
- Avoid using a spammy domain.
- Aim for sites with a DA 30+.
- Look for a website that requires a login to comment as this experiences less spam.
Ideally, target between 15 and 20 sites/communities that you will engage with to build up your reputation positively. For those working on brand development campaigns, this approach works. Use tools such as SEMrush and Moz.com to get excellent quality sources to use.
The benefits of using this strategy include having more SEO power, referral traffic, and building brand recognition.
Earning Links From High-Authority Domains
Link-building agencies will charge a lot of money to design your link-building strategy and implement it. Thats because earning links from high-authority domains is notoriously challenging. Focus on quality rather than quantity. You cant play the system without the risk of penalty.
Here are the most innovative ways to ensure that you naturally earn those backlinks from high-authority domains:
What Is Domain Authority
Domain authority is the term used to describe how highly a websites content is to rank on Google based upon the domains overall quality.
In the past there have been different methods of judging the quality of a website, Googles PageRank was one example. However, the most popular measure is now Mozs invention, which is simply called domain authority or DA.
Mozs DA judges a domain based upon the number and quality of links pointing to that site as well as a few other factors, which they have not made public. Based on these factors, Moz then issues a score between 1 and 100.
New sites begin with a domain authority of just 1 and the strongest sites are scored closer to 100. There is more information on how Moz comes up with their domain authority scores here.
For a simplified definition, you can look at this domain authority score as a metric that predicts a websites ability to rank its content in the search engine results pages .
The idea is new content on higher DA sites will rank faster and higher in the search results.
You can measure a sites DA by typing it into Moz link explorer tool.
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Start Link Building Activities
Itâs time to start the most critical step in building your websites Domain Authority.
Identify at least 6 long-form content within your website that people will love linking back to.
Find the low-hanging keywords with high search volume.
In the meanwhile, have a team lookout for prospective websites that you can reach out to.
You can follow the steps mentioned here to dosuccessful blogger outreach.
To build high-quality backlinks, you can also try other link-building strategies such as broken link building, link reclamation, unlinked brand mentions, etc.
However, if youâre doing blogger outreach, which is the most successful link-building practice nowadays, make sure you have a series of well-crafted outreach emails ready.
Thesuccess of blogger outreach campaigns depends largely on the outreach emails that you send to the prospective website owners.
Ensure that the most relevant long-form content is used as the reference within the email.
Also, make sure you send follow-up emails to the prospects whenever required.
NB: For a fairly new website to earn 100 high-quality backlinks, you have to send a minimum of 500-800 outreach emails.
Total Number Of Backlinks
More backlinks can level up your Domain Authority even if they come from the same referring domains. Therefore, you should focus on building large quantities of backlinks from high DA websites that have relevance to your own niche. If you have a good number of backlinks from credible websites, you too can have a higher score.
When it comes to accumulating backlinks, marketers often argue what is more important: backlink quality or quantity? The answer is high-quality backlinks make a much bigger difference in your backlink profile and rankings.
For example, when a high Domain Authority website links to your content, it can pull your site up the search results, even if you only get a single backlink. But when a low DA spam website does the same in large quantities, it can have zero effect and/or get your site penalized by Google. So you should remove harmful backlinks from your backlink profile and, at the same time, have high DA sites link out to your page to increase your Domain Authority.
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Identify The Best Types Of High Authority Sites
To earn a link from a high DA site, you need to know where to find them, especially when not all high DA websites are relevant to every business and every sector. However, finding the needle in the haystack isnt impossible. These are the sites to approach when youre looking to earn some quality backlinks.
Eliminate Any Harmful Backlinks
Sometimes its easy to get a little overeager with the backlink building, especially if your business took part in any of the not punished then but now not approved backlink practices. Private blogging networks, for example, will typically hurt you more than theyll help you, and spamming your link online is a fast way to get a Google penalty and a knock down on your domain authority score.
Check that backlink audit, and look over it closely. SEMrush will flag all the toxic links that you have, showing you the individual backlink, along with your overall ratio of positive-to-toxic links. Theyll also show you the number of referring domains youre getting backlinks from, which is helpful to see.
Create a list of backlinks you need to start working on. If you can remove them manually, go back and do so. For example, remove links to your site in the comments sections or forums. If, however, you no longer have access to the sites where your links are placed, which may be the case for something like a private blogging network, you should look at doing a link disavow through Google.
A link disavow should only be done if you believe that you have links that are knocking you down and if you havent been able to remove them manually. The process is pretty straightforward, and you can learn more about it here.
Dive Deeper:
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Domain Authority Helps Us Prioritize Outreach
SEOs like to build linksbut how do you prioritize your efforts?
Given our loose definition of domain authority, we can generally assume that its good to score a backlink, interview, or guest post from a site with really high domain authority. Therefore, when youre putting together outreach campaigns to court links from other sites, it can be helpful to prioritize high-DA sites over lower ones.