For anyone involved in SEO (search engine optimization), it is important to know that domain authority is one of Google’s 200 different ranking factors.
This article explains what real domain authority is, how important it is to your website’s ranking, and how to increase it.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority (DA) is a ranking metric that helps predict how well a website will rank in search engines.
Created by Moz and assigns a score from 1 to 100. Therefore, a higher score for your website means that it is more likely to appear higher in search engine page results (SERPs). Another way to look at the definition of Domain Authority is to indicate her website’s relevance to an industry or a particular topic. You can also check the domain’s strength and authority in the ranking.
However, there is a slight difference between domain authority and page authority, so don’t confuse them.
Domain Authority shows the ranking strength of all domains (and subdomains). Page authority looks at the ranking ability of individual pages. What Domain Authority Score Should I Aim For?
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What Is A Good Domain Authority Score?
There are many factors in calculating Domain Authority. But for reference, sites like Google, Apple, and Microsoft have higher DAs (95-100).
On the other hand, if your site is new, your DA is low (probably between 10 and 20). You should also know that a DA between 20 and 30 is easier to improve for a
website than between 70 and 80.
- Less than 30 is bad
- 30 to 40 is below average
- 40 to 50 is average
- 50 to 60 is good
- 60 to 70 is very good
- Above 80 is very good
Important points to remember are: DA helps predict how a website will perform in search results.
So I suggest you use it to compare with other websites in SERP and try to increase your DA and rank higher.
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How are domain authorities calculated?
Different tools have their own methods when it comes to calculating domain authority. Moz uses over 40 different factors to calculate your DA score.
But here are the most important factors:
- MozRank – Counts how many websites link to your web page. Also look at the quality of websites that provide inbound links to your website.
- Link Profile – This includes internal and external links from your website. So if your post links to a highly ranked site and has links from other reputable sites, you will get a good score.
- Root Domain – When checking your link profile, Moz also checks the number of unique backlinks. Suppose you have 100 links, but they come from one website. Moz sees this as one root domain. Therefore, it is important to get backlinks from various websites.
- MozTrust – Moz checks the trustworthiness of websites that link to your site. For example, getting links from university websites, government sites, and sites of large organizations will give you high scores.
- Page Structure and Usability – Achieving a high DA requires a page structure that makes it easy for search engines like Google to crawl the page. You also need to provide your visitors with a great user experience.
So, are you ready to learn how to establish domain authority? Let’s get started…
How to increase domain authority?
When you start strengthening your website’s domain authority, remember that it’s a long-term strategy. Here are some ways to increase your site’s DA:
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1. Getting Quality Backlinks From Authority Sites
As you may have noticed, backlinks play a big part in calculating domain authority. Not only that, backlinks are one of the two most important ranking factors.
Ahrefs research shows that 55.24% of websites don’t get any organic traffic because they don’t have backlinks. So it’s safe to say you need a backlink.
There are countless ways to get backlinks and boost your link profile. First, look at your top referral sources to find similar sites with backlink opportunities.
You can also use MonsterInsights to uncover the top inbound link sources. This is the best WordPress Google Analytics plugin that displays detailed reports on your dashboard.
You can also ethically spy on your competitors, look at their backlink sources and try to get links from the same sites. Another easy way to get links from quality websites is guest posting.
If you are looking for one of the best free guest posting site, you can try our free guest posting
2. Create killer link-worthy content
The second way to increase your domain authority is to create great link-worthy content. Why should your content be great?
When people find your post useful, they start sharing it with others. This increases your chances of getting backlinks from top websites such as educational institutions and government agencies.
Using a link from another site also increases the root domain. All of this helps ensure a high DA.
You can now create multiple content types including articles, step-by-step guides, videos, infographics, podcasts, slides, and more.
But a good place to start is to look at the most popular pages on your site, so you can create similar themes and content types.
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3. Audit your site and remove bad links
Inbound links are essential to your site’s DA and ranking, but bad links can hurt.
links from spam websites can lower a website’s domain authority. In some cases, Google penalties may also be imposed.
To avoid this, websites should be checked for harmful links and removed as soon as possible. You can identify bad links by examining a website’s complete link profile using various SEO tools.
If you can’t remove these links, you can disable or ignore them using Google Search Console. Therefore, our crawlers do not consider unnatural or spammy backlinks when indexing.
4. Optimize website structure and user experience
Remember that one of the factors in calculating domain authority was the website structure and its usability.
With proper structure, search engines can easily crawl web pages and index them into search results.
To help search engine crawlers, you can create a sitemap in WordPress. A sitemap contains all important pages and helps search engines easily navigate your site.
To improve the user experience of your website, you should first focus on making it mobile-friendly.
Google is now mobile-friendly. In other words, look at how your site performs on mobile devices. Therefore, it is important that your website works well and loads quickly on mobile devices.
Now we need to make sure the website is secure. To do this, get an SSL certificate and switch your website to HTTPS. You can also get the best WordPress security plugins such as Sucuri, which offers many features such as a web application firewall.
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5. Improve your internal linking Another way to improve the user experience of your
Using links to other useful web pages on your site can help keep visitors engaged and reduce bounce rates.
Internal links also make your site easier for search engine bots to crawl and help index your pages.
Another benefit of a proper internal linking structure is that link juice is passed from one of her pages to another.
Linkjuice is an SEO term that refers to the value of a page passed to another website. More links pointing to the page show that the page is trustworthy, thus giving search engines a vote of trust. All of this will help improve your domain authority.
To improve your internal linking strategy, you can use plugins such as Yoast SEO.
Yoast’s Link Assistant automatically generates an internal link report for your website and suggests relevant pages to link to.
How do you check your domain authority?
Now that you know how to increase your domain authority, here are some tools you can use to check your website’s DA.
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1. Moz Link Explorer
Moz Link Explorer allows you to check the domain authority of any website. Just enter your website or competitor’s URL and check the domain authority. This tool also provides information on the number of unique backlinks for the root domain and how many keywords are ranked for that particular domain.
Scroll down and you’ll see a report that looks like this: B. Links to this site, most followed pages, top pages, top anchor text, etc. Moz Domain Authority checker
2. Ahrefs
One of the best SEO tools, Ahrefs is another domain authority checker that you can use to find the DA of your website.
Ahrefs calls this Domain Rating, but it’s the same as Domain Rating.
Another caveat is that we use our own algorithms and coefficients to calculate DA. Therefore, you may see differences in results when compared to Moz and other tools. Ahrefs Domain Authority Checker
3. SEMrush
A popular tool among many SEO professionals, SEMrush also provides data about a website’s domain authority.
Visit SEMrush’s Backlink Analysis to view the DA of your site or your competitors. On the Overview tab, you can view your authority score (domain authority).
You’ve reached the end of the guide. So how long does it take for DA to go up? SEMrush Domain Authority Checker
6. Work on Your Technical SEO
Technical SEO is related to low-level SEO tasks and usually, once you get your technical SEO correct from the beginning, you don’t have to deal with it again.
On the other hand, if the technical SEO aspect of your website is not correct, then this can have a huge impact on your Domain Authority and rankings.
The critical SEO settings you need to check to include:
- Register your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools
- Create and optimize your XML sitemap and submit it to Google
- Check your robots.txt settings and use Fetch as Google to ensure that Google and other search engine spiders can crawl your website without problems.
- Consider migrating your website to HTTPS
- Add structured data (schema) information to help search engines understand the context of your content
- Make sure that you have a properly defined breadcrumb menu on all pages
- Make proper use of hreflang (in case you have a multilingual website)
7. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Having a mobile-friendly website is no longer optional or nice to have but it’s mandatory.
Here are a few reasons:
- Mobile searches are now more than desktop (about 60%).
- Most users start their search on mobile and then continue on Desktop
- Mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor (for showing in Google’s mobile results)
- Google is working on a mobile-first index and websites that are not mobile-friendly will simply not be included
- Not having a mobile-friendly version of your website (or responsive website), has a negative impact on your overall Domain Authority Score.
- If your website is not mobile-friendly yet, the best way to start is to go to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and run the test for your domain.
- Google will give you a nice report with recommendations on how to make your website mobile-ready. How to set up subdomain on Google Domains
8. Improve Page Speed
One of the well-known “signals” of the Google ranking algorithm is page speed. A fast-loading website has an advantage over a slow-loading website.
Improving page speed not only improves ranking and domain authority but also improves user experience, leading to more sales, leads, and sign-ups
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Addressing the page speed issue is not always easy. There are a lot of technical elements involved and it can be very difficult unless you are a developer or someone with technical knowledge.
If you can’t afford to hire a developer to make your website load faster, check the following:
- Remove unnecessary plug-ins.
- Update WordPress (and plugins) to the latest version. Provides reports on server performance. Upgrade to a more powerful server if necessary.
- Use caching plugins (e.g. wp-rocket)
- Optimize image file size
- Use streaming services (e.g. YouTube) for videos
- Use a CDN large minify CSS files and many images
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9. Increase Your Social Signals
Although officially Google has many times stated that social signals are not part of the Google Ranking algorithm, there is a clear correlation between pages that rank high on Google and social signals. Pages that are popular on Google tend to have many likes, shares, and tweets.
For the purpose of increasing your domain authority what you need to do is:
- To work on your Facebook business page and try to increase your followers
- Make sure that you have an active social media presence in some of the social networks so that the content you share will get some traction (likes, tweets, etc)
- Ensure that you have a social media button on your pages to make it easy for readers to share your content
- To check that your content looks good when shared using the social sharing buttons
10. Be Patient
As mentioned in the introduction of this post, increasing your domain authority is not something that can be done overnight.
It will take time for Moz crawlers to read and evaluate your website after you make any of the above changes, so you need to be patient.
Working systematically to improve your Google ranking can also have a positive effect on your Domain Authority Score.
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Conclusion
In summary, don’t get hung up on domain authority scores. This is just a number that tells you how strong your domain is compared to other domains in the Moz database.
A low DA score does not mean your website is not performing well on Google. A high
DA score means you’re on the right track, but it doesn’t guarantee better rankings or traffic. This is just a prediction.
One thing to keep in mind is that you cannot control the domain authority of your website. All you can do is put the pieces in the right places to keep your DA steadily increasing. So set a long-term strategy and use the points I mentioned to increase your DA.
I hope you enjoyed our article on what domain authority is and how to strengthen it. Also, check out our guide to the top Google Analytics metrics every business should track. Don’t forget to share to this article if you find it beneficial.
