What Is Domain Authority And How To Improve Domain Authority Score?

Understanding Domain Authority

If you have been blogging or have been a part of any digital marketing team, you might have come across something people like to refer to as DA.

"Oh, our website's DA just bounced up to 34" or "We need to work on getting links from higher DA sites"

If anyone is part of any blogging group on Facebook, I'm sure you might have come across posts like these-

Quick Tip: Don't invest in strategies like these. Doesn't work out well in the end

What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority or DA is a metric created by Moz.com to predict how likely a website will rank in search results in comparison to other similar websites.

The DA scores have a range from 1-100

The DA is calculated on a 100 points logarithmic scale. It basically means that it will be much easier to grow your Domain Authority from 20 to 30 than it would be to grow it from 60 to 70.

Though there are many parameters that are used to calculate the Domain Authority of a website, figuring out all the parameters is difficult because Moz uses Machine Learning Model to find and predict the Best Algorithm for the calculation.

In simple terms, the parameters keep on changing and evolving as time passes.

Some of the factors that definitely affect the DA rank are -

• Linking Root Domains: Quality of websites linking to your website
• Number of Total Links: Total number of backlinks or number of websites that have included links to your article/blog in their pages

There are many people who often consider Domain Authority to be the ultimate deciding factor for ranking on search engines. But let us clear this Myth once in for all.

Domain Authority is NOT a metric used by Google in determining search engine rankings and it has no effect on SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

- Moz Team 

Read It! Learn It! Remember It!

Search Engines have their own algorithms for ranking pages.

How To Check Domain Authority of Your Blogspot/Blogger Website or Blog

There are 3 ways in which you can find out the DA of your blog. Feel free to use any one of them to find out the Domain Authority Score of Your Blogger/Blogspot Website

Method 1: Moz Link Explorer

Follow the following steps -

1. Visit Moz Link Explorer
2. Create a free account on Moz
3. Enter your Website link in the respective box and the whole backlink profile along with the Domain Authority will be displayed

Method 2: SERP Analysis Section of MOZ Keyword Explorer

Follow the following steps -

1.  Visit Moz Keyword Explorer
2. Create a free account at Moz
3. Once you have logged in, Go to SERP Analysis section under Keyword Research
4. Enter your URL to get information about keywords and Domain Authority

You can also use this tool to search 10 keywords in a month (from the free account). We will cover more on this in the Keyword Planning Section of the course

Method 3: Install MozBar - Free Moz Google Chrome Extension

This is one of the best and fastest methods to instantly check the Domain Authority of any blog you visit. 

• Download and Add Mozbar Chrome Extension 
• Create a free account on Moz
• Sign in using the extension

You will be able to see Domain Authority of any blog you visit as well as on the Google Search Page

Here is the domain authority of Investopedia

Also, for a simple Google search about "Best Places To Visit In Mumbai", here is a snapshot of the search page

If you do a google search on "How To Check Your Domain Authority Score", multiple websites will come up. But, I always suggest using Moz to check the DA as it is created by them and it is the only authentic source.

How To Correctly Use Domain Authority?

The biggest misconception out there amongst many marketers and bloggers is that they should try to reach the ultimate score of 100.

Well, guess what guys, this is exactly what you should not try to do.

Websites like Facebook, Amazon, Wikipedia, Investopedia are usually the ones who have DA close to 100. They get millions of links shares a day. So, in case you believe that your website can match these then feel free to chase the 100 mark

So, does it mean that you should not pay too much attention to Domain Authority?

No! Not at all

The Correct Way To Use Domain Authority Score is to compare your website score with those of your competitors.

Anybody who is writing on the same category or niche and targeting the same keywords is your competitor. 

So, keep a check on these sites and try to stay ahead of their of domain authority score

Let Us Take A Simple Example To Understand This In A Much Simpler Way

How many of you remember your "Wake & Bake" website?  The small online website where you were selling your bakery items

Now, suppose you decided to compete with Amazon stating that you will be the number one e-commerce store on the web.

Well does it seems like a good strategy?

Do you have the resources and manpower to compete with Amazon?

I guess the answer will be NO for 99.9% of us

How many of you recollect our competitor store from the story? Yes, I'm talking about "Baker's Treat" website

We should try to beat and compete with the "Bakers Treat" website so that our website links gain priority over theirs. So, if someone searches about "The Best Bakery Nearby" or about "How To Make Muffins At Home" then Wake & Bake website links should always come ahead of Bakers Treat

So, stop competing with Amazon and start using DA to compete with competitor websites

How To Improve Your Domain Authority Score?

Follow these 5 steps to improve your Domain Authority Score

1. Identify Your Competition

The first step of improving the Domain Authority is to figure out who your competition is. This will help you identify your target DA is and will give you an idea of what you need to improve in comparison with your competitor. 

The below points will help you identify them - 

• Keywords: Find out which websites are targeting the same keywords as yours. You can use tools like Moz, Ahrefs. Semrush and Ubersuggest to find related sites. 

The above image is from Ubersuggest. The right side of the screen gives you information about the top-ranking websites for those keywords.

• Compare Categorically Similar Sites: This is another method is to find out different websites on the same niche as yours. Some of the methods of finding them are -
• Do a Google search for related topics
• Find them on social media
• If you are working for a business, get to know about the competing company from the market

Plus there are many ways to figure out. So, I urge everyone to list down 5 to 10 competitors in your niche.

Well, now you have the competitors list. So how do we beat them?

Visit their website and study their website in terms of -

• Their Domain Authority
• Site Size - How many posts, how many pages etc
• Content - What type of content, their style of writing, various topics they have written on, services they are offering 

Now accordingly, draft a plan and start improving your website.

2. Analyze and Compare Link Profiles

The next step is to analyze the backlink profile of your and your competitors' website. If you are a marketer then you can invest in the premium version of any tools like Ubersuggest, Moz, Ahreh and Semrush.

You can also get group access to them from Flikover. This will help you save a lot of money, especially if you are a small startup

For my blogger friends, you can too check it out. But, in case you don't want to invest in them right now then you can always use the free backlink checkers to get marginal information. I have listed some of the links below -

• Moz Link Explorer
• Ahrefs Backlink Explorer
• Ubersuggest Backlink Analyzer
• Semrush Keyword Gap Analyzer

Check out the link profile and accordingly draft a plan to improve yours

3. How To Get More DoFollow Links For Your Website

There are two types of linking -

• DoFollow Links: These pass on the authority of the referring domain to the external link
• NoFollow Links: These do not pass on the authority of the referrer to the external link

In order to increase your DA, you need to get more of Dofollow links. The other ones do not matter too much.

Some of the best ways to get more Dofollow links are -

• Create great content that people would want to link to
• Guest Blogging on relevant websites
• Creating infographics which others can use on their websites ( You can use Embed Code Generator for the same purpose) 

4. Check Status of All Your Top Pages

Sooner or later you will realize that some particular pages get more visitors than others. So, you have to got to take special care of them. Below is a small checklist for you to maintain them properly -

• Make sure they are accessible and active
• Make sure they do not return a 404 page
• Try to avoid redirects
• Keep them optimized in terms of speed and mobile usability

5. Promote your Top Pages and Content

The last step will be to spend more time and money (in case you are opting for paid advertisement etc) on your top pages rather than the whole domain as such.

This will help you build up your customer base much faster.

Hope you have picked up some insights from this article. Feel free to mention any feedback and doubts in the comments section below.