Domain Authority is a scoring system developed by Moz.com. It determines how high your website will rank on search engines like Google. The higher the Domain Authority score result in a greater potential rank, scores range from 1 to 100.

To view what a certain website’s Domain Authority Score is, numerous SEO tools provide access to it. One being MozBar (a Google Chrome add-on).

Domain Authority’s scoring system

Scores go up to 100 from 1 and is calculated on the popularity of your website. As a site gains popularity, it becomes harder to move up in levels. Going from 10 to 20 is much easier than going from 80 to 90.

Examples of sites with high Domain Authority

Sites with a great amount of quality backlinks will usually be at the high-end of the Domain Authority scale. YouTube and Facebook are prime examples. These two sites have been referred by Internet users all over the web and in a natural way. Smaller business-orientated websites will obviously have lower DA scores due to fewer natural external links. Unknown reputation and low traffic is also a factor.

Difference between Page Authority and Domain Authority

A Page Authority score is based on the individual pages on your website, depending on the quality of the content, this can be either a high or low score.

Gaining Domain Authority

Domain Authority can be a difficult system to gauge, metrics like MozRank and MozTrust (along with others) all have a saying in the final Domain Authority score. This gives Google an idea of which sites are quality and competitive in the search results. Google analyses the site’s reputation and the metrics calculate everything for a definitive rank.

Practicing SEO is the best-known way to boost your DA, you should focus on external links by other sites with high DA scores themselves. This will tell the metrics that your site is so well-respected that other reputable sites are linking towards it.

The lowering or heightening of a DA score

Domain Authority, due to the many metrics and calculations, can be a difficult task to determine what exactly is causing your low DA score. Some of the factors can be;

• Very recent external links and those that haven’t spotted by Moz’s index checker.
• High ranking sites have seen sudden growth of links thus throwing the whole scale off whack.
• Sites that have been linking to your site are not considered by Google.
• Juggernaut sites like YouTube, Wikipedia and Twitter have a stranglehold on the scale and the nature of the system determines that your site is on the lower-end as a result.

Content is indeed King

You may have heard this phrase repeated over and over before, but it is true.

Ever since Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, the Internet giant has been weeding out all sites which have poor content. Badly written articles, eyesore presentation, copied content, spun articles, spammy links and an overly promotional tone.

A site with informational and quality content will always be respected by Google and eventually awarded a high DA score. If you accompany this with backlinks and positive word of mouth then your site should gain levels in Domain Authority.

Pin this for later…