If you’ve spent any time on the internet, you have all likely heard of the term “domain authority,” especially if you’re a blogger.

What is it, exactly? Why is it important for a website’s success? Let’s talk about the ins and outs of domain authority, including how it’s calculated, how you can improve it, and its limitations.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority, or DA for short, is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz. It predicts how well a website will rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) based on a 0-100 scale. The higher the DA score, the more likely a website is to rank higher on SERPs.

It’s important to note that DA is not a metric used by Google’s algorithm to determine a website’s ranking. However, Moz’s DA score is widely used by SEO professionals to evaluate a website’s potential to rank. Meaning, Google doesn’t use your DA score, but you can, as a measure of how well your website/blog is performing and if there’s room for improvement.

How is Domain Authority Calculated?

Domain Authority scores are calculated based on a variety of factors, including the number and quality of inbound links pointing to a website, the website’s age, and its content relevance. The score is updated regularly, so a website’s DA score may fluctuate over time.

Yes, the age of your domain can help you, if your blog is well established and he’s running for years.

No, the age of your domain isn’t going to harm you, if you’re a newer site. Focus on linking structures, to improve your score, and your domain aging with you will help improve the score more.

How Can You Improve Your Domain Authority?

Improving your DA score can be a time-consuming and ongoing process, but there are several strategies you can use to boost your score over time:

1. Focus on building high-quality backlinks from reputable websites in your industry or niche. Make friends with other bloggers, and cross-promote. When you promote their blog, you’re helping their DA, and when they promote your blog, they’re helping you. WIN/WIN.
2. Create high-quality, original content that is relevant to your target audience. People often think it’s just about stats, but in reality, the content you share does drive stats.
3. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly and has a fast loading speed. You can have all of the best content on earth, and if your page is slow and a pain int he ass to load, people won’t stay, so your DA will be affected.
4. Promote your website on social media and other channels to increase its visibility and drive traffic. Social media posts that call attention to your blog are backlinks. Albeit, they’re not as valuable as say… other bloggers sharing your links. However, they still count. every little bit counts.
5. Monitor your website’s backlink profile regularly to ensure there are no spammy or low-quality links that could hurt your DA score.

Why is Domain Authority Important?

Having a high DA score can be beneficial for your website in several ways. For one, it can help your website rank higher on search engine results pages, which can drive more organic traffic to your website. It can also help build your website’s credibility and authority in your industry, which can attract more high-quality backlinks and improve your website’s overall visibility and online presence.

What Are the Limitations of Domain Authority?

While DA can be a helpful metric to evaluate a website’s potential to rank, it’s important to note that it’s not a perfect indicator of a website’s quality or relevance. Additionally, since DA is a third-party metric, it may not always align with Google’s algorithm, which can result in discrepancies between a website’s DA score and its actual ranking on SERPs.

Where people get it wrong:

Have you ever looked at YouTube videos or Reddit posts where people are spamming with links of a site that have zero relevance to the original topic at hand?

These are spammers/scammers using bots to try and built a fast, effective back-linking profile to have their spam/scam rank higher on search engines. If you’ve ever been bombarded with comments on your own blog, now you know why.

Have you ever noticed that many corporations, or companies, have blogs yet very few actually leave comments open on their blogs?

This is for a reason. Companies, due to their traffic earned and relevance in their field, are treated as a more valuable source for backlinks. Spammers and scammers think that if they can write their link in a blog comment, it’ll be more valuable then if they spam John Doe’s comments section.

It’s worth noting, Google’s ability to catch spams/scams, while not perfect, has improved five-fold over the past few years. It’s something they’re actively working to improve every day, because Engineers are aware that, so long as there’s a ranking system on the internet, people will try to exploit that system for their own personal game. As of right now, dropping a link to your blog on 100, or 1000 different blog comment sections in one day isn’t going to do much more than get you flagged for spam. So please don’t adopt this technique.

TL;DR

Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz, which predicts a website’s potential to rank on search engine results pages. It’s calculated based on a variety of factors, including the number and quality of inbound links, the website’s age, and its content relevance. Improving your DA score can help boost your website’s credibility and online visibility, but it’s important to remember that it’s not a perfect indicator of a website’s quality or relevance.

Do you have any questions about Domain Authority? Leave them in the comments section of this post and I will do my best to answer.

-Vee

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Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash