Domain Authority score is not a new word in the world of SEO, but
still there are many bloggers who are not sure of what is domain
authority and what is it’s importance. This is a detailed guide in which
you will learn about DA, how to check domain authority score and few
more terms which are must know.
Domain authority is one of the top factor which define how well your website will rank in search engine. In old days, a website used to be weight based on their page-rank, but now it’s domain and page authority which plays a major role in the ranking of any domain. This is one topic I wanted to share with you for long, as once you understand what is domain authority (DA), you would start focusing on creating an authoritative blog.
DA consists of 40 ranking signals such as number of links pointing to the site, number of linking root domain, MozTrust, MozRank to name a few. DA measures the authority of complete domain, similarly PA (page authority) is the measure of an individual page.
If you are using Chrome or Firefox browser, you can use MozBar extension to check Domain authority and page authority of any webpage. (Highly recommended).
Domain authority ranking factor consists of over 40+ signals, but there are few things which you can start doing from now on to increase your website domain authority. First lets understand what makes a good DA by understanding MozRank and MozTrust.
Like
MozRank, MozTrust is also dependent on links but in this case, it
measures how closely you are connected to a trusted website on the web.
For example, a government website, an .edu website are usually
considered as trusted website, and if you are linked in 1 hop (A .gov
site linked to site call “A” and site “A” links to you), you are more
likely to have more MozTrust. Think of MozTrust as link distance between
your webpage and a trusted source. Mistrust is also measured on a scale
of 0-10, and you can increase your MozTrust by getting links from
high-trust websites (Wikipedia, Government site, university site). You
can learn more about MozTrust on Moz SEO.
Factors which affect MozTrust:
As a blogger, you should be interested in two factors:
Q.If you are wondering how often domain authority checker gets an update?
A. It’s usually 1-2 times in a month.
If you have never emphasised on Domain authority score, it’s time for you to use above mentioned domain authority checkers and check your DA score. If your DA score is low, you should start working on the above tips to get higher DA score.
Have any question? Feel free to ask via comment section. Don’t forget to share this guide with others on Facebook and Google plus.
Domain authority is one of the top factor which define how well your website will rank in search engine. In old days, a website used to be weight based on their page-rank, but now it’s domain and page authority which plays a major role in the ranking of any domain. This is one topic I wanted to share with you for long, as once you understand what is domain authority (DA), you would start focusing on creating an authoritative blog.
Table of Contents
Domain authority is a metric which was created by Moz (SaaS company), and it rates a website on a scale of 1-100. 100 being the best and 1 being the least. The higher the domain authority of a website, it means it would rank higher in search engine. Instead of thinking of Domain authority as a measure of your SEO effort, think of it as a competitive metric against other site. The good way to look at it is; compare your website DA score with your competitor DA score, and the one who have more DA is more likely to rank higher in search engine.
DA consists of 40 ranking signals such as number of links pointing to the site, number of linking root domain, MozTrust, MozRank to name a few. DA measures the authority of complete domain, similarly PA (page authority) is the measure of an individual page.
There are few domain authority checker available online which you can use to check your website DA. The first one is official Moz open site explorer where you need to type your domain address or sub-domain address, and it will show you the latest DA score. Here is DA report for my blog:
If you are using Chrome or Firefox browser, you can use MozBar extension to check Domain authority and page authority of any webpage. (Highly recommended).
Domain authority ranking factor consists of over 40+ signals, but there are few things which you can start doing from now on to increase your website domain authority. First lets understand what makes a good DA by understanding MozRank and MozTrust.
What is MozRank:
MozRank is measured based on link profile of a domain. It is calculated for any webpage on the internet based on the number of links pointing to the page. Along with quantity, quality of linking page also plays a major role. A handful of quality pages linking to your webpage will give better MozRank than many low-quality links pointing to your webpage. MozRank is measured on a scale of 0-10, and 10 being the highest. An average MozRank for a webpage on internet is 3.What is MozTrust:
Like
MozRank, MozTrust is also dependent on links but in this case, it
measures how closely you are connected to a trusted website on the web.
For example, a government website, an .edu website are usually
considered as trusted website, and if you are linked in 1 hop (A .gov
site linked to site call “A” and site “A” links to you), you are more
likely to have more MozTrust. Think of MozTrust as link distance between
your webpage and a trusted source. Mistrust is also measured on a scale
of 0-10, and you can increase your MozTrust by getting links from
high-trust websites (Wikipedia, Government site, university site). You
can learn more about MozTrust on Moz SEO.Factors which affect MozTrust:
- What websites you link to (Always link to quality web-pages when ever possible, and don’t link to spam or illegal sites)
- Domain registration info: This was suggested by Rand that your domain registration info could also play a great tole in deciding the trust factor for your Domain. If you have 10 website with same/similar domain registration info, and 8 out of 10 are bad websites, it might make it hard for you to earn trust for other 2 quality websites.
- User data signals: This depends on how users are interacting on web and collected via various sources such as Google toolbar, Google analytics, free Wi-Fi.
- Domain age: Let your domain age, as much as it can (Older it is, better it is). You can’t do much about it, but try not to change your domain name again and again. If you are a BlogSpot blogger, it’s a good idea to use a custom domain name from the begining.
By improving your domain authority, you are also increasing the chances of improving your search engine ranking. Think of DA as a point to calculate how competitive a website is in Google search. Higher the Domain authority of a website, it would be harder to outrank it. Similarly when you are working on link-building for your blog, you should try to gain link from websites having higher Domain authority score.
As a blogger, you should be interested in two factors:
- Increase the domain authority of your blog.
- Get links and mention from other blogs/websites with high DA.
Days to expiry of domain name:
This is probably the easiest thing which you can do now to affect
your domain ranking. Days to expiry is not a very strong, but yet a
deciding factor for a good website. It gives trust to search engine for
long-lasting website. If your domain is set to expire in next 1 year, I
would recommend you to extend it for next 3-4 years. It would hardly
cost few dollars and it would be helpful in longer run.
Get more links to your site:
This is one big factor which will affect your DA score the most. Try to earn as much as backlinks as you can, but make sure those links are from quality sites.
If you buy backlinks or get links from low-quality sites (Automated
methods), this is going to do more harm than any good. (See: Google Penguin & negative SEO)
Diversify your link profile:
Instead of getting tons of links from set of few sites, focus on
getting links from diverse sources. That includes link from various
geo-location, various domain extensions and sources which are not
inter-connected. Needless to say, links should be relevant and should be
of high-quality.
Internal link structure:
This is one important factor that you can easily control. Have you visited Wikipedia site recently? Have you noticed how powerful their internal linking is.
Make sure your every post is linked to 2-3 others posts on your blog,
and when you publish a new blog post, go back and link from your old
posts. This will also pass link juice from old posts to the new one.
Remove bad links:
Along with creating new links, you should also keep an eye on bad links pointing to your site. You can service like monitor backlinks to get email notifications for new links. When ever a bad link is pointing to your site, ensure that you get it removed or use Google Disavow tool to ignore those links.
Become an authoritative source in your niche:
Quality of your articles are more important than the quantity of
articles. Even if you publish only 2-3 high-quality posts in a week,
that is still better than publishing 7 medium or low quality content.
Along with publishing high-quality content,
become an authoritative site in your niche. Become the news breaker or
make sure your reader trust every page on your website, this will have a
great impact on overall user-experience and your search engine ranking.
I’m not sure if it is directly related to increase domain authority
or not, but it will definitely give a great push in search engine
ranking. (Note: Domain Authority uses 40+ signals and look at the
pattern of search engine ranking by Google). So, if you make Google
happy, your DA score will also improve over the time.
On site SEO :
Make sure your website is search engine optimised, as it control things like where link juice should pass, how easy it is for search engine bots to crawl your site and how user centric your content and navigation is. Here are few things which you would like to focus in On Site SEO:- Noindex archive pages (Noindex your tags, categories, pagination and author archive pages)
- Sitemap file ( Have a sitemap file link in your footer and in robots.txt file). Make sure you have submitted your sitemap file to major search engines like Google and Bing.
- Meta title and Meta description of homepage.
- Maintain proper heading hierarchy in your blog post. Here is a good guide on how to use heading tags for SEO.
Make your website load faster..
I could have included page load time in On page SEO, but I believe after Google made page loading time as an official ranking factor, you should start giving great importance to loading time of your website. You can use sites like tools.pingdom (More sites here)
to check existing loading time of your site. If your site is not
loading within 3 seconds, you should start working on speed optimisation
of your site. For WordPress blogger, here is a quick checklist:
Social Media marketing and branding:
Social media plays a major role in ranking of your content and it’s
not certain if it’s a ranking factor for domain authority or not, but
it’s definitely a ranking factor in Google search engine ranking
algorithm. Make sure your brand/blog have presence in all major social
media platform. Ensure that your readers are sharing your content on
social-media platform (Helps in boosting ranking and improves indexing).Q.If you are wondering how often domain authority checker gets an update?
A. It’s usually 1-2 times in a month.
Conclusion:
Back in the days , Google page rank was a measuring factor for any webpage on the internet, but it was flawed system. I have already proved the same by getting PR3 for a blog with no content and by building just backlinks. Where as Domain authority score is well-maintained and now the most trusted way to measure the rank and authority of a webpage on the internet.If you have never emphasised on Domain authority score, it’s time for you to use above mentioned domain authority checkers and check your DA score. If your DA score is low, you should start working on the above tips to get higher DA score.
Have any question? Feel free to ask via comment section. Don’t forget to share this guide with others on Facebook and Google plus.
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