What Is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority score is not a new phrase in the world of SEO, but there are many bloggers who are unaware of domain authority and it’s significance.

Following is a detailed guide in which you will learn what you need to know about “domain authority” (including how to check your domain’s authority score!),  as well as some additional related terms which are important to understand.

Domain authority is one of the main factors that define how well your website will rank in search engines.

In the “old days”, a website was weighed based on its page-rank. Now, domain and page authority play a major role in the ranking of any domain.

I wanted 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 which was created by Moz (SaaS company), for the purpose of rating a website on a scale of 1-100, (100 being the best and 1 being the worst). So the higher the domain authority of a website, the higher its ranking in search engines.

Instead of thinking of domain authority as a measure of your SEO effort, think of it as a competitive metric against other sites.  So if you compare your website’s DA score with that of your competitor’s site, the site with the higher DA score is likely to rank higher in search engine searches!

DA consists of 40 ranking signals such as the number of links pointing to the site and 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 complete domain.  Similarly, PA (page authority) is the measure of an individual page.

1. How to check domain authority? 

here are a few domain authority checkers available online which you can use to check your website’s DA. The first is the official Moz open site explorer where you type in your domain or sub-domain address, and it will show you the latest DA score.

If you are using the Chrome or Firefox browser, you can use MozBar extension to check the domain authority and page authority of any webpage, and I highly recommend that you do so.

Domain authority ranking factors consist of over 40+ signals, but there are a few things which you can start doing right now to increase your website’s domain authority.

First lets understand what creates good DA by understanding MozRank and MozTrust.

       

       2 . What is MozRank?

MozRank is measured based on the 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 the linking pages also plays a major role. A handful of quality pages linking to your website will give a better MozRank rating than many low-quality links pointing to your website.

MozRank is measured on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the highest. An average MozRank rating for a webpage on the Internet is 3.

      3 . What is MozTrust:?

Like MozRank, MozTrust is also dependent on links. With MozTrust, however, what is measured is how closely you are connected to a trusted website on the web. For example,  a government website or an .edu website are usually considered as trusted websites.  If you are linked in one hop (a .gov site links to a site called “A” and site “A” links to you), then you are more likely to have a better MozTrust ranking.  Think of MozTrust as a ranking of the link indicating the distance between your webpage and a trusted source.

MozTrust is also measured on a scale of 0-10, and you can increase your MozTrust ranking by getting links from highly trusted websites (Wikipedia, government sites, university sites, etc).

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:t has been suggested by Rand that your domain registration info could also play a significant role in deciding the trust factor for your domain. If you have 10 websites with same or similar domain registration info, and 8 out of 10 are bad websites, it might make it hard for you to earn trust for the 2 quality websites.
• User data signals:This depends on how users are interacting on the web, and is collected via various sources such as Google toolbar, Google analytics, free Wifi.
• Domain age:Let your domain age as much as it can because the older it is, the 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 beginning.

Note: You might notice a website or webpage having high MozRank but low MozTrust.  This is likely because it’s easy to manipulate MozRank by building lots of links in a short amount of time.

How to improve domain authority:

By improving your domain authority, you are also increasing your chances of improving your search engine ranking. Think of DA as a manner of calculating how competitive a website is in a Google search. The higher the domain authority of a website, the harder it is to outrank it. Similarly, when you are working on link-building for your blog, you should try to gain links from websites having good domain authority.higher Domain authority score.