Domain Authority is a type of web search ranking score, designed to predict the actual ranking of a website in Google or Bing. Its an estimate on how well a website can rank in search results, which makes it perfect for any SEO effort. This ranking score is developed by MOZ and the rating scale goes from 1 to 100, 100 being the highest score for a website’s ability to rank higher.
In order to come up with this domain authority ranking, many factors are evaluated, including the number of linking root domains. Domain Authority is often used in SEO projects as a comparing websites tool and it can be used also to track down how consistent the ranking strength of a particular website is.
It is very important to clarify that DA (Domain Authority) is not an official Google metric, therefore it will have no impact on either SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) or any of Google’s actual metrics.
DA by MOZ can be added as a Google Chrome extension - appears as MozBar - and it can be found on many SEO tools available on the internet.
As we mentioned before, DA is scored on a scale from 1 to 100. Now, since it’s a logarithmic scale, it gets more difficult to grow a score on higher levels.
Is It Necessary For My Website To Have Domain Authority?
If a website has a good number of external links, from high-quality sites, it means that it will rank very high in the Domain Authority scale. Opposite to this, medium and smaller companies - who are likely to have fewer high-quality external links - will rank lower and will have a reduced DA score. For brand new websites, the “default” score is always one.
Now, companies with high DA rankings are only halfway, so a big score here should be only the start of an SEO strategy. Remember that DA will only predict search results rankings, so a good compliment here can be looking at your competitor’s DA scores and start creating solutions to have higher scores than those sites you’re directly competing with.
It’s clear that Domain Authority is an SEO tool that can be used for comparing scores. These comparisons can lead to a good SEO strategy because it will show you which websites have better strategies that are making them rank higher.
How To Do A Proper DA
We’ve already established that DA is an SEO tool that gives you a good idea of how well a website can rank in search results and that you can use it to check your website’s probability to rank high in web search results. In addition to this, you can also use it on other websites to see how they rank.
Well, if you want to conduct a good DA process, you need to compare your website with your direct competitors. If you run a small e-commerce site, there’s no point comparing it to Amazon, for example.
By comparing your DA to those within your same “league” you can find a solution or strategy ideas to overcome any SEO issues your site may be having.
How Can You Make DA work For You
It can be pretty hard to have a direct influence on Domain Authority. It was designed with link data and metrics and metrics are used to measure competitivity among different websites. Keep in mind that Google itself takes many factors into consideration, DA must also incorporate many elements to guarantee accurate calculations.
The best natural way to have a good impact on your website’s online positioning is simply by making sure that you update and optimise all of your SEO tasks.
More specifically, your SEO efforts should be aiming towards getting more links from authority sites within your industry
How Does Domain Authority Work
DA is made of data taken from a link explorer web index plus many other calculations. The main Domain Authority calculation tries to predict the algorithm that correlates MOZ link data with thousands of real-life search results.
Now, since the whole “authority” comes from machine learning calculations, chances are that the more data points are used in the calculations, the more your website will fluctuate in its DA scores.
Let’s say that somehow a big authority website like Wikipedia or Amazon get a million new links, it will definitely affect everyone's DA. For this reason, people should always implement Domain Authority a comparing tool. DA is a relative metric that can compare between different website’s link profiles. It should never be used or taken as an actual score or as the real value of your SEO processes.
What To Do If My D.A Score Suddenly Drops
DA consists of many calculations and metrics so it can be a rather hard task to know what was the reason for any domain authority score changes. Despite this, there are some influencing factors.
When big authority sites experience an unexpected link growth which affects the scaling process.
An increase - or decrease - in the number of your website’s acquired links, compared with the last time you checked your DA.
The links you’ve gathered have zero relevance to Google rankings.
You’re running a brand new business hence your DA is at the bottom scores, so it gets a bigger influence from scaling fluctuation.
Finally, the best way to understand Domain Authority is by knowing that many factors affect scores. This means that even if your company is doing good, there are so many other companies are also improving their links, that you may see your DA drop, even if you're doing good SEO and the company is in good shape.
Remember that DA uses a 100-point system every time it gets updated. These recalculations can make a website’s score go down, even if the website has improved the quality and number of links. This goes to show how important it is to see DA as a comparative SEO tool, not an absolute metric determiner.
Further questions regarding DA and ways to make that a good complement to your SEO efforts, click here.