What exactly is Domain Authority?
To begin, Domain Authority (DA) is not a ranking criteria that Google utilises to determine how to rank your website; nonetheless, Domain Authority is a useful statistic for determining how your website compares to rivals.
“Domain Authority (DA) is a statistic established to assist estimate how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages,” according to Moz. This score goes from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating a better likelihood of your website appearing highly on the SERP. Moz generates Domain Authority using predictive machine learning modelling and data from its Link Explorer web index tool, which combines hundreds of data factors to get an overall score. While not all of these metrics are available, Moz has said that overall SEO website health (on page optimizations, metadata optimizations, technical SEO improvements) and high authority backlinks have a favourable influence on Domain Authority.
Moz isn’t the only tool that use this sort of criteria to assess possible rankability. SEMrush, for example, provides an Authority score that is calculated using comparable data (i.e. backlink quality, amount of referring domains, keyword ranks). Furthermore, ahrefs offers its own tool that assesses your website authority utilising data points identical to those used by Moz and SEMrush.
What Does a Good Domain Authority Score Look Like?
While Domain Authority is not a consideration in Google’s ranking algorithm, it may be a useful third-party indication of how your website compares to others.
Obviously, higher-scoring websites (1-100) have more ranking indications than lower-scoring ones. Having said that, comparing your site to the websites of your rivals is a good way to judge its success. Because each website is unique in terms of the kind of backlinks it gets, the authority of those referring sites, and the availability of referring domains. It is critical to examine your top rivals and have a knowledge of the baseline Domain Authority in your industry before proceeding.
For example, if your sector and rivals acquire backlinks from high authority websites like Forbes, Business Insider, Wikipedia, Universities, or Government agencies, the baseline domain authority will be rather high. However, sectors that are not relevant to these sorts of domains (e.g., restaurants, small companies, etc.) may seek backlinks that are more relevant to their personas regardless of Domain Authority, resulting in lower scores throughout the industry and a decrease in the “industry baseline.”
How Do I Determine My Domain Authority?
As previously stated, there are a number of tools available to help users determine the Domain Authority of their website. For example, Moz and Ahrefs both offer free versions that enable viewers to enter any domain into this tool to examine its Domain Authority. This may be beneficial when comparing one’s own domain to rivals’ domains to examine how their website compares to a range of criteria such as Domain authority, connecting domains, inbound links, and ranking keywords.
How Can I Increase My Domain Authority?
Increasing the Domain Authority of your website is a long-term approach that relies on obtaining high-quality backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites. Furthermore, in order to properly increase Domain Authority, you should concentrate on acquiring referring domain links rather than many links from the same domain.
Concentrate on content relevancy.
Receiving backlinks becomes considerably simpler when you have high-quality and relevant content for the sites you’re targeting. Furthermore, the greater the quality of your material, the more probable it is that you will get natural connections from other sites who will reference your work.
Examine your backlinks
In addition, you should analyse your backlinks on a regular basis to ensure that only high-value connections are indexed. If you discover that you are obtaining backlinks that are badly impacting your overall score, you should utilise tools like Google Search Console to prevent these connections from hurting the trust of your content and site as a whole.
Keep an eye on your rivals.
Finally, audit your rivals’ backlinks. This may help you uncover websites that have previously linked back to comparable material and may be more ready to link back to your content as well.
Takeaway
It is critical to understand that Domain Authority is not a consideration in Google’s ranking algorithm. As a result, increasing your Domain Authority should only be one of your entire SEO plan.
That being said, Domain Authority can be used as a barometer of how your website’s rankability compares to your competitors as well as the quality and quantity of websites referencing your content and referring traffic back to your website.
