Domain authority score is not a new term in the SEO world, but many bloggers are not aware of domain authority and its importance.
Here’s a detailed guide to learn all about “Domain Authority” (including how to check your domain’s authority score!), as well as some other important related terms.
Domain authority is one of the main factors that determine how your website ranks in search engines.
In the “old days”, the authority of a website was determined by its page rank. Nowadays, domain and page authority play a major role in the ranking of any domain.
I want to share this important topic with you because once you understand what Domain Authority (DA) is, you can start focusing on creating an authoritative blog.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz (a SaaS company) that rates websites on a scale of 1-100 (100 being the best and 1 being the worst). Therefore, the higher the domain authority of a website, the higher it will rank in search engines.
Don’t think of domain authority as a measure of SEO effectiveness, but rather as a measure of competition with other sites. So if you compare your site’s DA score to that of your competitors’ sites, the site with the higher DA score will likely rank higher in search engine searches!
DA includes 40 ranking signals, such as the number of links pointing to your site, the number of linking root domains - essentially the number of other sites linking to your site! (See MozTrust, MozRank, etc.)
DA measures the authority of the entire domain. Similarly, PA (page authority) measures the authority of a single page.
How do I check my domain authority?
There are a few domain authority checker tools available online that you can use to check your website’s DA. The first is Moz’s official Open Site Explorer, where you can enter your domain or subdomain address and it will display the latest DA score.
If you are using Chrome or Firefox browsers, you can use the MozBar extension to check the Domain Authority and Page Authority of any web page, and I highly recommend doing so.
The domain authority ranking factor consists of more than 40 signals, but there are things you can start doing right now to improve your website’s domain authority.
First let’s understand what creates a good DA by looking at MozRank and MozTrust.
What is MozRank?
MozRank is measured based on the link profile of a domain. It is calculated based on the number of links pointing to any web page on the Internet.
In addition to quantity, the quality of the linking pages also plays an important role. A small number of high-quality pages linking to your website will lead to a better MozRank ranking than a large number of low-quality links pointing to your website.
MozRank scores range from 0-10, with 10 being the highest score. The average MozRank score for web pages on the Internet is 3.
What is MozTrust:
Like MozRank, MozTrust relies on links. However, MozTrust measures how closely connected you are to trusted sites on the web. For example, government sites or .edu sites are often considered trusted. If your links are in the same hop (.gov site links to site called "A", which in turn links to you), then you are more likely to have a higher MozTrust ranking. Think of MozTrust as a link ranking, indicating how close your page is to a trusted source.
MozTrust is also measured on a scale of 0-10, and you can improve your MozTrust ranking by getting links from highly trusted sites (Wikipedia, government sites, university sites, etc.).
You can learn more about MozTrust at Moz SEO .
Factors that influence MozTrust:
- What sites you link to: Always link to high-quality pages whenever possible, and don’t link to spammy or illegal sites.
- Domain registration information: Rand points out that domain registration information can also play an important role in determining the trust of a domain. If you have 10 websites with the same or similar domain registration information, and 8 of them are bad websites, you may have a hard time gaining the trust of the other 2 good websites.
- User Data Signals: This is determined by how users interact on the web and is collected through various sources such as Google Toolbar, Google Analytics, Free Wifi.
- Domain age: Try to keep your domain name as long as possible, as the older it is, the better. Although there is no age limit for domain names, try not to change them repeatedly. If you are a BlogSpot blogger, it is best to use a custom domain name from the beginning.
Note: You may notice that some sites or pages have a high MozRank but a low MozTrust. This may be because it is easy to manipulate MozRank by building a large number of links in a short period of time.
How to improve domain authority:
By increasing your domain authority, you also increase your chances of improving your search engine rankings. DA can be thought of as a way to calculate how competitive a website is in Google searches . The higher the domain authority of a website, the harder it is to rank higher. Similarly, when building links for your blog, you should try to get links from sites with a higher domain authority. The higher the domain authority score.
As a blogger, you should focus on the following two factors:
- Improve your blog’s domain authority
- Get links and mentions from other blogs/websites with high DA.
Here is a list of ranking factors that have the greatest impact on your DA and PA (page authority) (with explanations):
The remaining valid days of the domain name:
This is probably the easiest way to influence your domain rankings. The number of days until your domain expires is not very important, but it is a decisive factor in building a quality website. It shows search engines that these long-term websites are trustworthy. If your domain is expiring next year, I recommend renewing it for 3-4 years. It will only cost a few dollars more, but it will benefit you in the long run.
Get more links to your site:
This is probably the single biggest factor affecting your DA score. Get as many backlinks as you can, but make sure they are from high-quality sites. If you buy backlinks or get links from low-quality sites (using automated methods), you will do more harm than good.
Diversify your link profile:
Rather than acquiring a large number of links from just a few websites, focus on acquiring high-quality links from a variety of sources. This includes links from different geographic locations, different domain extensions, and unrelated sources. It goes without saying that the links should be relevant and high quality.
Internal link structure :
This is an important factor that you can easily control. Have you visited Wikipedia pages lately? Did you notice how powerful their internal links are? Make sure each of your articles links to 2-3 other articles on your blog, and when you publish a new blog post, also look back at your previous articles and add links to them. This will also pass on the link juice from the old article to the new one.
Remove bad links:
In addition to creating new links, you should also keep an eye out for bad links pointing to your site. You can use a backlink monitoring service to receive email notifications. Whenever there are bad links pointing to your site, be sure to remove them or ignore them using the Google Disavow tool.
Become an authoritative source in your field:
The quality of your posts is more important than the quantity. Publishing 2-3 high-quality posts a week is far better than publishing 7 mediocre or low-quality posts.
In addition to publishing high-quality content, work on becoming an authority in your field. Become a news whistleblower, or make sure readers trust every page on your site. This will have a significant impact on the overall user experience and your search engine rankings. I’m not sure if this is directly related to improving domain authority, but it will definitely improve your site’s search engine rankings.
Note: Domain Authority (DA) is based on over 40 metrics and is based on Google's search engine ranking patterns, so if your domain satisfies Google, your DA score will improve over time.
On-site SEO:
Make sure your website is optimized for search engines, as this controls where link juice is passed, how easily search engine bots can crawl your site, and whether your content and navigation are user-centric.
Here are a few things you should focus on when doing on-site SEO:
- Noindex Archive Pages (Noindex your tag, category, pagination and author archive pages)
- Sitemap file (add sitemap file link in footer and robots.txt file). Make sure you have submitted sitemap file to major search engines like Google and Bing.
- Meta title and Meta description for the homepage
- Keep your blog post titles organized hierarchically. Here’s a guide on how to use title tags for SEO .
Make your website load faster
I could have included page load time in the on-page SEO reference, but I think that now that Google has made page load time an official ranking factor, you should start paying close attention to your site’s load time. You can use a site like tools.pingdom to check your site’s current load time. If your site doesn’t load in under 3 seconds, it’s time to start optimizing your site’s speed. For WordPress bloggers, here’s a quick checklist:
- Use only the best WordPress hosting companies .
- Compress and optimize your images before uploading them.
- Use a caching plugin like Super Cache , WP Rocket , or W3 Total Cache .
- Use CDN to serve the content. You can use the free CDN provided by Cloudflare – ( Benefits mentioned here )
Social Media Marketing and Branding:
Social media plays a big role in how your content ranks. It is debatable whether social media is a factor in domain authority ranking, but it is definitely a ranking factor in Google’s search engine ranking algorithm. Make sure your brand and blog are visible on all major social media platforms. Also, make sure your readers share your content on social media platforms. This will help boost rankings and improve indexing.
Q: I want to know how often the Domain Authority Checker is updated?
A: Usually 1-2 times a month.
in conclusion:
In the past, Google Page Rank was the measure of any web page on the Internet, but it is a flawed system. I can attest to this from personal experience: my blog had no content and achieved a PR3 simply by building backlinks. On the other hand, the Domain Authority Score is well maintained and has become the most reliable way to measure the ranking and authority of Internet web pages.
If you’ve never paid attention to your website’s Domain Authority score, now’s the time to check your DA score using some of the Domain Authority checking tools mentioned above. If your DA score is low, you should start trying the above tips to improve it.
Have questions? Feel free to ask in the comments section!
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