Domain Authority: How to Measure the Authority & Quality of A Website

As a beginner in digital marketing, you may be wondering how to measure a domain’s quality and authority. If that’s true, this article is written just for you. This article by experts at a digital marketing agency in Mumbai will tell you all you need to know about Domain authority and a website’s quality.

So let’s get started.

What does Domain Authority mean, and why is it so important?

 

Moz created Domain Authority (DA), a score that predicts a website’s likelihood of ranking on search engine result pages. Scores for domain authority can vary from 1 to 100. Higher scores indicate greater ranking chances.

Domain Authority is calculated using data from the Link Explorer web index. It uses many factors in its calculations. Domain Authority uses a machine-learning model to find the “best fit” algorithm predictably.

This algorithm correlates our link data to rankings across thousands of search results. We use these standards as scale points. If you want to outsource your SEO campaign? Check out our search engine optimization packages in Mumbai.

Understanding Domain Authority:

First, it is important to understand the components of DA before you can determine your website’s authority. Domain Authority is scored from 1 to 100, with 100 the highest score.

These are the Moz methods that determine your Domain Authority

•    MozRank: MozRank is a measure of the quality and quantity of links on a website. A website with 100 low-quality links will have a lower MozRank score than one with 50 quality links.
•    Root domains: Moz also considers your website’s number of links. Your score will be higher if you have more websites linking to you.
•    Search engine friendliness: Later, we’ll be looking at technical SEO, but this factor considers how your website interacts with search engines. Moz considers how user-friendly your site is based on its overall structure.
•    Quality Content: Google, and other search engines, consider the quality of your website’s content. Your Moz Domain Authority score is another example. Your website will do better in this area if it has high-quality content.
•    Social Media Signals: Moz considers social media signals when determining Domain Authority scores. The algorithm considers how often  a piece has been liked, shared, commented on, or liked via social media platforms.

How does Domain Authority work?

Domain Authority is calculated by combining multiple factors such as linking root domains or a total number of linked sites into a single DA score.

This score can be used to compare websites and track a website’s “ranking strength” over time. Domain Authority does not affect the SERPs. It is a Google ranking factor.

The Domain Authority 2.0 update was released in early 2019. A machine-learning algorithm predicts how often Google uses a domain in search results.

This is the basis for calculating a domain’s DA Score. Domain A will appear more often in a Google SERP than domain B, so domain A’s score would be higher than domain A’s. This presentation explains the Domain Authority update and demonstrates how to talk about it with your team.

You can also learn how to use DA2.0 metrics in this whitepaper.

Your site’s DA score is calculated using machine learning calculations. Your site’s score can fluctuate depending on how many, fewer, or different data points are available. These data points are incorporated into the calculations.

If facebook.com acquired a billion links, all other sites’ DA would fall relative to Facebook’s.

Facebook and other authoritative domains will have larger link profiles. This means that they will take up more high-DA slots. It leaves less space at the top for domains with weaker link profiles.

It’s much easier to increase your score from 20-30 than to make it 80-80. Domain Authority should be used as a relative metric and not an absolute.

Factors that impact website authority:

Different algorithms favour different factors in calculating website authority. It’s rare for the full details of a proprietary algorithm to be publicly made. Like SEO, it can be difficult to improve your site authority.

One of the leading SEO company in Mumbai states elements that could determine the authority rating of your website:

1.     Inbound links:

Your site authority score is still affected by the original influencer. A general rule of thumb is that more websites linking to you from third parties will increase domain authority.

There are, however, a few exceptions.

• Rel=”nofollow” attribute is used inbound links to inform search engine robots that they should not pass any authority along the link path.
• Google’s crackdown against ‘unnatural’ links and manipulation of the authority metrics will result in a penalty for paid inbound links.
• You may be unable to link from websites with a low authority score.

Any inbound link can still bring human visitors to your website if they click on it. This is why it’s important to see the SEO benefits of link-building campaigns. If you can get an inbound hyperlink included naturally on a website with a high authority page without using the “nofollow” attribute, your website authority will likely increase.

2.     Linking websites: Authority

Your site authority score will be affected more if the third-party website linking to you has a higher authority. Your authority can be described as the sum of all links to your page multiplied by their authority.

This is a good thing to remember if you are pursuing website authority campaigns as part of your ongoing SEO efforts. If you can get featured on a national news website with a link to your homepage, this could be enough to pass significant ‘link juice to your domain from the high-authority news site.

This can have a surprising consequence: if a website links to you, it may increase its authority score. Your rating could also go up. If you know a website with strong backing and ambitious goals, it may be worth being featured on the site.

Referrer sites have a lot of outbound links.

The important caveat to this is that the website with the most outbound referral links has the lower authority, often called “link juice”. Each link passes less authority.

This is quite understandable. This means that websites with high authority can’t artificially increase the number of vast web pages on the internet by simply including large numbers of outbound links within their content.

When building inbound links, it’s important to understand how common it is for particular sites to link to third parties.

An authoritative site with few external links on its pages is more valuable than one with many references at the bottom of each page or regularly hyperlinks to brand names and other sources.

How to increase your website’s authority:

It’s not as easy as changing your meta tags to improve your website’s domain authority. This requires extensive research from your side.

Increasing your domain authority can be done in a variety of ways. Get rid of any bad links before you begin these steps, as the authority of the website will rise.

1.     Do your technical SEO

Your domain authority score will rise if your technical SEO is in order. This is the core of any SEO strategy if you want to increase your SERP rankings. This includes a complete audit of your meta, keyword count, keywords, alt tags and site structure.

These are quick ways to improve your technical SEO.

•    Keywords: Be sure to not include keywords in your content. This will improve your SEO and make it easier for your audience to read and process your content.
•    Meta Description:Make sure your meta description is complete. Your main keyword should be included in your description.
•    Image Optimization: Optimized Images Speed up your website’s loading speed and increase SEO.
•    Heading tags: Although this is a basic idea, it should still be mentioned. You can use your H1, H2, or H3 heading tags to highlight your main points.

2.     Make linkable content

Your DA score will also determine how well you market your content. This tactic must have lots of shareable, linkable content. You won’t have strong backlinks if you don’t create content that other people want to link to.

Create long-form, high-quality content that is informative and relevant to your niche. Your content should not be limited to written content. Infographics and video content can also be linked and help you get traction on your website.

Although it takes time and money to create lots of content, it is one of the best SEO strategies that will also increase your DA score.

3.     Link internal

Marketers are being pushed to put more emphasis on backlinking. Linking to other pages on your website can help improve your DA score. Backlinking will not only increase your DA score.

Here is where your vast content collection comes into play.

You can link to more places on your site the more content you create. Interlinking helps search engine crawlers determine how authoritative your site is.

4.     Use social media to share

 

Social media signals play a significant role in SEO. You must share your content across all social media platforms. This improves your domain authority score and increases traffic to your site.

Including social media link buttons in your content is a good idea. 

This makes it easier for visitors to share your content on their social media accounts.

The best practices for web authority campaigns:

Learn a few tips and tricks from the best SEO company which will help you achieve better results when you plan to build a link-building campaign to increase website authority.

1.     All links are not created equal-

You need to understand that not all links to your website are equal. They will not only pass different amounts of link juice to your authority score, but they will also send different numbers of human visitors who will land on different landing pages.

Consider which landing pages you want third-party publishers to link to when creating a link campaign. Whether or if you should produce interesting, new material that people will want to connect to is something to think about.

Whitepapers, infographics, and whitepapers are all examples. People naturally link to useful and engaging content, even if you don’t ask them.

2.     Approach high-authority publishers –

Find out if you can get inbound links from high-authority publishers that don’t use the “nofollow” attribute.

Check their pages to verify that outbound links do not include rel=”nofollow”. They may do this regularly. If so, you might not want to ask them to link to your site.

Publishers of websites with high authority will be able to understand your goals. They probably did not get their authority rating by chance. So please don’t be reluctant to discuss it. A valid referral hyperlink is a key outcome of any collaboration.

3.     Enhance your internal link structure –

External links can be distracting, and it’s easy for people to forget to optimize their internal link structure.

Search robots can crawl your website through internal links, too. They interpret pages that have the most hyperlinks to them as the most important.

This is logical: Pages like your homepage and top-level categories pages likely feature on every page’s navigation menu.

In contrast, pages further down the hierarchy may only link from specific category index pages.

You can also create your SEO centipedes by adding the external referrer website or SERP to the head of each centipede.

This gives authority to your landing pages, which are informative and engaging but not commercial. The link will take you from your landing page to an internal eCommerce page. This gives you authority and creates a sales funnel that encourages human visitors to order.

You will find an eCommerce page that generates revenues at the tail end. This page should rank higher in the SERPs due to the page authority you have given it via internal links.

4.     Internal links are a way to transfer authority –

Without the need to trace back from a search engine result page or a third-party website, internal links can help you pass page authority around your site.

Each page on your website will have a different amount of authority. These algorithms are complex so a few more links can make a difference in the authority of each page.

You can limit this by linking from high-authority pages to low-authority URLs. This will often happen naturally, e.g. If you link from SEO-optimized content to a simpler page like a contact form.

To artificially alter your internal link patterns, you can pass more page authority on URLs that you wish to rise in search results.

You can use this for many purposes. One simple example is updating old internal links to a page with more current information. This will attract more traffic to the page when it appears in search engine results.

Learn more about setting up a website hierarchy and how to pass page authority through internal hyperlinks in our Definitive Guide for Internal Linking.

What’s a good or average Domain Authority score for you?

Sites with high-quality external links (such as wikipedia.com and google.com) rank at the top of the Domain Authority scale. Websites with fewer links or small businesses may score lower DA scores.

You can explore Moz’s list of top 500 websites on the web to see the effect Domain Authority and other link-based metrics have on a site’s popularity and rankings. An entirely new website will start with a Domain Authority score of 1 and grow as it earns more authoritative backlinks.

Domain Authority indicates a site’s ability to rank in its particular competitive landscape. You shouldn’t pick your target DA without considering this. It would help if you looked at the DA scores of the sites competing within the SERPs.

Try to get a higher score than the competitors. You can compare websites in your target SERPs using DA. This is useful for identifying websites with stronger link profiles than yours — your true rivals.

The metric is subjective, and there is no absolute “good”, “average”, or “bad Domain Authority score. There are only scores that can be considered “good”, “average,” or “bad” in the context of a specific competitive landscape.

Why has my Domain Authority changed?

Domain Authority is complex and includes multiple metrics and calculations. It can be difficult to pinpoint the cause of a change because Domain Authority has many different metrics. Many factors could be influencing your score, including:

• Our web index has not yet captured your link profile growth.
• Link growth was significant for sites with high authority, which skews the scaling process.
• Links earned from sites that aren’t in Google rankings were not included.
• We included your domains in our index and crawled them more often than in previous crawls.
• Your Domain Authority is at the lower end of the scoring spectrum and thus is more affected by scaling fluctuations.
• Your site was affected in 2019 by Domain Authority 2.0. This implementation caused a 6% decrease in DA across all websites. It also resulted from restructuring and improvements to how DA is calculated.

Understanding Domain Authority fluctuations is key. Each domain’s score is dependent on how it compares to other domains across the DA scale. Even if a website has improved its SEO, its Authority score might not reflect that.

Let’s look at the “best of” lists as an illustration.

Are they guaranteed to be #1 on the list of best air quality if Singapore has the highest air quality in 2020 and then improves it further in 2021? What happens if Denmark improves its air quality?

Or what happens if New Zealand joins a rating system with extremely high air quality in 2021 after being left out of the 2020 rankings?

Perhaps the air quality of countries ranked 2-10 has improved significantly, and Singapore drops to #11 despite their improving air quality. The scale has changed, and Singapore’s ranking can change independently of its actions.

Domain Authority operates in the same way. It’s based upon machine learning and continuously compared to every website on the scale. After each update, recalculations mean that a site’s score could drop even though it has a better link profile.

This is how a scaled, relative system operates and serves its goal. Authority scores can be considered relative measurements instead of absolute ones.

Conclusion

That’s a wrap on this extensive guide to domain authority. We hope that it has given you some insights into what it is and how you can accurately measure it.

Hopefully, you can make informed decisions regarding which keywords you want to rank for and the pages you want to target.

Thanks for reading, and we wish you the best of luck in your search engine optimization endeavors! If you’re interested in learning more about these subjects, see our most recent blog on H1 Tag SEO Optimising Your Header for Better Search Engine Ranking