Domain Authority (DA) is an important website metric for SEO. It is a score (on a scale of 100) developed by Moz which predicts how well a website will rank in search engine result pages (SERPs).
In short, the greater your site’s Domain Authority, the more likely you are to rank high in search engines.
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Domain Authority is calculated by combining several link metrics such as linking root domains, total number of backlinks a site has aka link profile, and Moz’s own linking metrics such as MozRank, MozTrust, etc.
In order to approximate Domain Authority score with actual Google rankings, Moz employs machine learning techniques against Google’s algorithm to predict how Google search results are generated.
Domain Authority is scored on a 100-point scale. As such, it’s easier to grow your site’s score from 20 to 30 than it is to grow from 70 to 80.
According to Moz, sites with a large number of high quality backlinks (such as Wikipedia, Google.com, YouTube) are at the very top of the Domain Authority scale with a score of 100.
On the other hand, websites and blogs with fewer number of authoritative backlinks have much lower DA. New websites will always start with a Domain Authority score of 1.
Pro Tip: To see the domain authority of any website, download the free MozBar chrome extension. This will allow you to instantaneously see the domain authority of any website you visit from your browser.
Like this:
Domain authority of Search Engine Journal as calculated by Moz
Several SEO experts believe that DA is unalterable and something that we have little control over. However, there are some subtle ways to increase domain authority.
In this article, we will unveil 5 ways in which you can increase domain authority of your website and rank better in SERPs.
But before that here are 3 key things you need to understand about domain authority:
- Domain Authority is primarily based on the number of backlinks your site has and how authoritative the backlinks are.
- Getting a Domain Authority score of 100 is difficult and rare. Only sites such as Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. have a DA of 100.
- As stated earlier, DA is difficult to influence directly. It takes time and effort; so be patient.
Now that you have a basic understanding of domain authority and how it works, let’s examine some of the ways you can increase domain authority of your website.
1. Create High-Quality Content that is Linkable
This may sound cliched, but content is one of the few things that has a direct impact on domain authority.
Effective content marketing requires creating authoritative content on a regular basis. This can go a long way in increasing the domain authority of your website.
So how do you create content that others constantly link to?
Here are 2 ways you can achieve this:
- Publish Long Form Content
- Create Infographics
Publishing short 300-500 word articles will not help you stay ahead of the curve anymore. These days, Google SERPs are dominated by long form content which are articles with a minimum of 1200 words. These articles tend to be more descriptive, cover a particular topic in-depth, and tend to attract more backlinks.
Here’s a graph by serpIQ which shows the correlation between long form content and position in Google SERPs:
Yet another effective way to get more backlinks for your content is by publishing infographics.
Infographics are engaging and get shared a lot on social sites such as Pinterest and Tumblr. You can also gain authoritative backlinks by submitting your infographic to infographic submission sites or trying Brian Dean’s ‘guestographic’ method.
I have covered this topic in detail in this article here. Read it to learn more about how you can easily create a professionally-designed infographic and generate high-quality backlinks.
2. Ensure that Your Site’s Technical SEO is Good
In order to have a positive impact on domain authority, you need to improve the overall SEO of your website. Making sure that your site’s technical SEO is in place is at the core of improving your site’s domain authority.
Technical SEO are factors such as site speed, schema markup, meta data, HTML code length, mobile-friendliness, etc.
Check out these resources below to optimize the technical SEO of your website:
- 10 Technical SEO Tips to Boost Your Site’s Rankings
- How to Speed up Your Website (8 Actionable Tips)
3. Remove Toxic Backlinks on a Regular Basis
Your site will have a few toxic and spammy backlinks which may negatively influence your domain authority.
As a result, you need to constantly check your site’s link profile and remove these toxic links to get your site back on Google’s good books.
Remove these bad links from your website on a monthly basis and you’ll see your site gain a competitive advantage. You may have the most authoritative links to your website, but if your link profile is filled with spammy backlinks, your site will suffer in SERPs.
Ahrefs is a great tool that can help you remove toxic backlinks from your website’s link profile. Here’s a blog post from Ahrefs that explains how you can find and remove toxic backlinks from your link profile.
4. Build Strong Internal Links
An internal link is one that points to another page on the same website.
Often overlooked by SEOs in the quest to generate high quality backlinks, building strong internal backlinks is just as important to improve your website’s domain authority.
Internal links are useful for 3 reasons:
- They allow visitors to easily navigate your website
- They help establish information hierarchy for your website
- They help spread link juice around websites.
According to Moz, internal links are most useful for establishing site architecture and spreading link juice.
The optimal structure of a website would resemble a pyramid as shown in the image below (where the big dot on top represents the home page):
Image Courtesy: Moz
Internal linking helps both for the users and the search engines that crawl and index your website. It’s a great way to generate organic traffic for your website and improve your site’s domain authority.
5. Domain Age Matters (So Be Patient)
One of the key factors to greater domain authority is the domain age. The older the domain, the greater its domain authority. So even if you create high-quality content, build strong internal links to your website and make sure the technical SEO of your site is good, your DA score may not outscore that of your competitors so easily.
To find out the domain age of your site, you can use this free domain age tool developed by Webconfs.com.
However, domain age doesn’t equal domain authority. If the domain isn’t constantly updated with rich content and still follows black hat SEO techniques, the DA of the site will automatically go down.
The most important thing to remember here is that it takes time to improve your DA. If you’re doing all the above steps as explained, you will notice a gradual rise in your site’s domain authority. It’s just not going to happen overnight.
Here’s an infographic we designed to summarize this article.
Conclusion
Producing high-quality content on a consistent basis is key to increasing your website’s domain authority. As long as you are creating content that provides value to your target audience, you will see steady spike in your DA. Just focus on creating remarkable content and everything else will fall in place.
So what factors would you consider key to influencing domain authority? Let us know in the comments section.
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great post. thank you admin !
Glad you liked it! 🙂
Thanks for sharing.. i recently purchased a domain name where i will be blogging mainly entertainment news, any hep to build links on this niche
It’s difficult to have 100% Domain Authority and it is rare with minimum websites. Domain Authority depends on the number of backlinks does the websites have. Amazing blog and informative too.
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.
Yes, I totally agree with your opinion. Excellent points you have mentioned now I can know how I can increase my Blog’s DA. You are unquestionably right. Domain Authority is an overall website’s SEO score. Many webmaster SEO people do more wrong than good to their domain by spending for cheap links on Tumblr and other freelance sites.
In short, CONTENT IS KING, and then I would like to add an extension to that; TRAFFIC means royalty for the king. Smart SEO people and developers create a new site, produced high quality of content and distribute it into social medias, and after one week, their content went viral really fast, their sites have ranked up to #1 Google for Long Tail Keyword. Moreover, I think that having high-quality backlinks is the most important factor that makes a great impact on DA. Of course, there are loads of other factors that affect SEO; however, HQ backlinks are absolutely essential for a good DA level.
Anyways, thank you very much! I bookmarked this post to be very valuable!
G8 Post!
Thanks, Vaibhav! Glad you found the article useful. 🙂
I been reading all day on how to increase DA and you did a great job breaking down DA vs PA, i don’t have a problem with PA, but the DA side is crazy, i have some good backlinks, but DA never increase, i think; i have to many links that are no follow, so i’am not seeing a increase in DA, but thanks for some great knowledge, it was needed
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Hey Sandeep,
Thanks for writing this post, but I have few questions in my mind, recently while talking to some of my website’s potential buyers, found out that Domain authority is one factor that can fetch me some extra money, but I am confused on how can I quickly increase it, whether I should work on it or let it be?
Also While researching about DA, I have found out another metric called MajesticSEO Trustflow, is it also worth following & working?
Looking forward to a quick response.
~ Beth Hein
Hi Beth,
Glad you found the post useful. Most SEO tools, including Majestic SEO, use their own algorithms to calculate the importance of a particular website and arrive at a score similar to DA. For instance, Ahrefs calls the same metric Domain Rating (DR). Ever since Google’s PageRank was deprecated, Moz’s DA has slowly risen into prominence and is more popular than any other website measurement score of other tools.
If your DA score is high, then chances are your Trustflow score will also be high. Having said that, I’d urge you not to focus too much on your DA score. Just focus on creating high-quality content and obtaining authoritative backlinks with various outreach techniques. Your site’s DA will take care of itself as long as you’re doing these two things on a consistent basis.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Sandeep
Thanks for this info. Your pdf link for the infographic is not working.
Sorry about that. We don’t use that opt-in software anymore, hence the link isn’t working. Thanks for bringing this to our notice. We’ve removed the link!
Thanks a lot .Nice step you discussed in this blog. these all are true factors for getting good domain authority.
This content on improving page author and domain authority is informative and filled with great tips ✨
I’m glad to see that most of the techniques you mentioned in your post are also been implemented on my site 👌 . Once again thanks for putting out such content.
We have been in the Search Engine marketing industry for a while, but I always learn something new everyday. Thank you for putting a great explanation for DA. I was never sure how to explain DA to other people, but I have so much better picture now. Thank you.
Domain Authority is really important. Better DA means better SERP. It depends lot of factors as you have mentioned and yes, we need to take care of all these things and get higher DA.
Thanks for the informative post
Domain Authority of our website (www.xiteb.com) was descreased within three months.I need to know the reasons..
Sandeep,
I totally go with your ideas to improve the domain authority. Does the blog post frequency affect DA? What are all the factors that cause DA to drop gradually? Before being boosting the DA, I am supposed to stop the declination. Hope you can help me out.
Great Information, explained clearly.
Hi Sandeep,
Thanks for sharing this post, is there any way to increase the DA is fruitful or any other way that increases speedily in less time.
I think domain age, quality links and content are some important factors on which the Domain Authority Depends. Thanks for this detailed post. Got to know about some unknown factors.
We have been in the Search Engine marketing industry for a while, but I always learn something new everyday. Thank you for putting a great explanation for DA. I was never sure how to explain DA to other people, but I have so much better picture now. Thank you.
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Sandeep, good stuff!
Have you ever done any research on how accurate DA really is as a ranking factor?
During the last 2 years I did a lot of work on my site on SEO, content and (white hat) link building. I improved my site’s ranking to be in the top 3 Google results for most relevant keywords and increased traffic by 1000% (yes, no typo, the site had not much traffic before). – Still my DA actually fell from 21 to 19 during that time.
So, I wonder how important DA really is.
This is an old post. With Moz’s declining popularity and relevance, DA is not the industry-standard metric used to gauge a site’s authority. Ahrefs’ Domain Rating (DR) is a more accurate metric. Nevertheless, DA and DR are both not ranking factors. They are metrics used by SEO companies to indicate a site’s authority and relevance, and it’s mostly based on the number of authoritative links pointing to your site.