Domain Authority (DA) is a much debated topic in the SEO world. Walk into a pub and see two SEO pros talking to each other, they’re more likely to be debating DA scores than football scores. Well, maybe not. But it does cause a lot of debates. DA is a metric to determine the strength
Domain Authority (DA) is a much debated topic in the SEO world.
Walk into a pub and see two SEO pros talking to each other, they’re more likely to be debating DA scores than football scores.
Well, maybe not. But it does cause a lot of debates.
DA is a metric to determine the strength of your website and how likely it is to rank.
The higher your site’s domain authority, the more likely you are to rank for your key terms in SERPs.
Makes sense.
But is domain authority all it’s cracked up to be?
Imagine you’re walking down an aisle at the supermarket.
Every item on the shelf is the same (websites in SERPs).
But, you notice something. All the other products are pointing at one product in particular, saying, “this is a good one”.
This is essentially how domain authority is judged. It’s how much authority your website has, mostly based on how many other websites are pointing to it.
One thing you should know (and this is why DA is a debated topic).
Domain authority isn’t actually used by Google as a ranking factor.
Google’s John Mueller, as far back as 2016, has said that “Google doesn’t use domain authority”.
Domain authority is a scoring system developed by Moz as a trust score based on how many links your website has from other trustworthy websites.
So if you have a brand new domain, your domain authority is likely going to be close to 1 (because you have no topical authority, or links from other websites).
On the other hand, a large website like the BBC or the Guardian will have a domain authority score of 90+, because they’re highly trusted websites.
So, improving your domain authority doesn’t guarantee you’ll start to see an improvement in rankings.
Even Moz admits domain authority isn’t a ranking factor.
Just before we move on, there are a few other ratings it’s worth mentioning, because they’re likely to come up at some point in the future.
This is the trust score of your website as a whole.
This is just domain authority, but for a specific page on your website. It’s completely possible for a page score to be significantly higher than the overall domain score.
This is the same thing as domain authority, except it was created by another SEO tool – Ahrefs (just to confuse you).
Honestly, there’s no evidence that it does.
Google certainly doesn’t pay any attention to your website’s DA when ranking pages. And even Moz admits domain authority isn’t used as a ranking factor.
Check any SEO tool and don’t be surprised to see websites with lower DAs outperforming websites with seemingly better DA scores.
But.
And this is a big but.
Websites with higher DAs tend to have more quality backlinks from other trusted websites than those with no or fewer backlinks.
And for sure, backlinks are a very significant part of how well your website ranks.
Think of it like an election.
Google is more likely to rank a website with lots of backlinks (votes) over a website with fewer backlinks.
So, even though no one can definitively say that a higher domain authority equals higher rankings in SERPs, a higher DA is a good sign because it means you have good backlinks and perceived trust from Google.
Moz has a free domain authority checker you can use to create 3 free reports a day. If you have an account, you can create unlimited reports.
You just put your URL into the search bar, and the report will tell you your site’s DA, how many linking domains your site has, and the number of keywords you rank for.
Even if we can’t say domain authority is a ranking factor, it’s still something you should pay attention to.
And it’s relatively simple – although not easy – to improve your website’s domain authority.
Earning high quality backlinks from trusted websites (think news websites, trade magazines and industry blogs) is one of the best ways to improve your site’s domain authority.
You can do this in a couple of ways:
The content on your website plays a big role in your domain authority and rankings in SERPs.
Forget about sales focused content.
This should be thought leadership content using eBooks, whitepapers, blogs, case studies and interactive tools to show yourself as an authority on the topic you’re talking about.
Creating this type of content not only builds topical authority for Google (a ranking factor), but increases the chances of other websites linking to your content – which grows your domain authority.
Creating content clusters and internal links between relevant pages can help search engines find and crawl your pages, meaning there’s more chance of them ranking in search.
This blog, for example, is part of a content cluster around the bigger topic of SEO for businesses.
Internal links are one of the most underrated ways of improving search rankings that you can start from day 1.
I’m not going to lie, building domain authority is a long term game.
No matter how quickly you publish new content or build links to your pages, you’re not going to go from 1 to 90+ overnight.
It takes a consistent effort of link building and creating high quality content to boost your domain authority.
But, the results compound over time.
It’s like watching interest compound on your pension.
It starts off slow, but you soon start to see bigger movements and increases that will benefit you more over a longer time frame.
There are all kinds of things thrown around about what domain authority is and just how much it matters.
Let’s just take this time to put some of those myths to bed so we can all move on.
I’m afraid not. Google really doesn’t care about the domain authority of your website. It’s a score created purely by Moz.
Again, no. Having a high DA helps (because it means you’ve probably got a decent backlink profile). But you’re not going to rank automatically just because you have a 90+ DA score.
3 – Once it goes up, your DA can’t go down
Afraid not. If you lose backlinks, your DA score can drop. So it’s something you have to keep building on.
DA score is something you can check using a few SEO tools.
Moz obviously shows you your DA score and we’ve shown you already how you can see it for free.
SEMrush gives you a full domain overview that includes the domain authority of your site so you can monitor it overtime.
You can see what that looks like here…
Moz, obviously, lets you check your DA score on their dashboard as well as Ahrefs (but, remember, they label it “domain rating”)
The way we look at domain authority is it can’t do you any harm to have a higher score.
Although there’s no way for sure to say that a higher DA will help you rank, it does mean you have some of the elements that Google looks for in a high ranking website.
The main thing is it shows you’re building good, high quality links from other trusted websites (which is no bad thing).
It’s also a good signal that your content is trusted by other websites, which, again, is no bad thing when Google is looking at which websites to rank.
I’ll also just mention here that AI overviews seem to put a lot of weight behind links and mentions, so if you want to be seen in AI search, again, the links you’re building to grow DA are going to help.
We’ve got loads of content on our website about doing SEO for businesses and getting the most out of your organic search.
Just go to our blog, which is always being updated with new resources.
If you’re ready to start seeing improvements now and want the help of an expert search engine optimisation agency like Paramount Digital, then feel free to get in touch with our team today.
We can grab a coffee and talk about your goals and see where we can add some value to your digital marketing.
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