Since there are countless websites attempting to establish themselves on the web, it is crucial that they are ranked according to their credibility and authority. Among the websites trying to secure a respectable place for themselves on the internet, there are media publications, as well as spam-bots that put users at risk.
When you search a particular keyword on the internet, search engines such as Google make use of a set of algorithms that determines the search results that should be displayed on your screen. The decision is made considering a number of factors which are not really known to internet users.
Many web publishers and developers are familiar with a number of SEO terms and phrases like Meta keywords, Backlinks, and Google PageRank. However, many of them are not aware of the term Domain Authority (or DA) and the effect it has on the position of a website on the web, despite it being present for a while now.
Understanding Domain Authority
Domain authority, in layman terms, is the measure of how powerful a domain name is. It is also one of the factors that search engines use for ranking the numerous websites out there. Domain authority basically takes into consideration three main factors; website size, age, and popularity.
Domain authority is a metric system created by the famous SEO gurus Moz. The company has its own search algorithm which gauges the quality of a given site based on a complex combination of various factors including offsite and onsite factors.
It also takes into account the factors like the diversity of backlinking domains and comes up with a score that ranges from 0 to 100; 100 being the best score and 0 being the worst score.
For example, a brand new website will have a score of 0 while a high authority website will have a score of up to 80 or even 100. With domain authority, people in the field of online marketing get a useful metric with which they can judge the apparent quality of a website. The higher domain authority that a website has, the higher the ranking it has in search engine results.
Domain authority also provides networks and advertisers information about how profitable it will be for them if they decide to advertise their products at a specific domain.
How is Domain Authority Calculated?
Various factors are used for calculating the domain authority of a website including the linking root domains, MozTrust, MozRank, and the number of links present in total on the said website. All the factors are evaluated into one score which can be used for comparing websites and for keeping track of the strength of a particular website.
Instead of perceiving domain authority as the measure of the amount of SEO effort that you put in, consider it a competitive metric against other websites. You can find out a site’s domain authority using our nifty tool.
Can Domain Authority be Influenced in any way?
Unlike all the other SEO metrics, it is quite difficult to influence domain authority directly. As mentioned earlier, the score is calculated taking into account many factors and each factor impacts the score individually.
This complexity was intentional as the purpose of the metric is to determine how competitive the site is on Google. Furthermore, Google also takes a variety of factors into account so a metric that calculates it must also consider a lot of factors.
Still, the best shot you have got on influencing the metric is through improving your SEO, such as blogger outreach, for example. Particularly, you must focus on the link profile by gaining more links from well-linked-to pages. Improving your link profile influences MozTrust and MozRank which in turn improves your rank.
To increase your domain authority, you must also make sure that the content you put out is of high-quality and completely original.
Effect of Improving Domain Authority
Improving a website’s domain authority increases the chances of improving the rank your website has on search engine results. Domain authority can also be thought of a measure of the competitiveness of a website. Websites that have a higher domain authority are harder to outrank.
Importance of Domain Authority
According to experts, it had been recently announced that Google will soon start to punish the quick-fire guest posts in the next algorithm updates. As a result, it has become difficult for all the content developers to rank better with content that is sub-par.
There is no method that can be used to manipulate the system and all the online publishers will probably be on level ground with the upcoming updates. Domain authority is a way of understanding the performance of your site and is considered quite important with respect to online presence. Domain authority is much similar to Google and influencing such a metric that considers a number of factors to calculate your rank is almost impossible.
Furthermore, since Google has dropped the update to PageRank, domain authority will soon be the key metric that will be used to gauge the quality of a website, often required by advertisers.
