In short, the greater your site’s Domain Authority, the more likely you are to rank high in search engines.
How is Domain Authority Calculated?
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.
How is Domain Authority Scored and What is a ‘Good’ Domain Authority?
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
How to Increase Domain Authority of Your Website?
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: 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. [ctt template=”3″ link=”7Dad7″ via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]How to Increase Domain Authority (DA) of Your Website (5 Proven Ways) https://www.99signals.com/increase-domain-authority/ @99signalsblog[/ctt]
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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