Domain Authority: What is Domain Authority and How to Increase It

Table of Contents

+ Introduction to Domain Authority (DA)
+ How Often Does Moz update Domain Authority (DA)?
+ How to Increase Domain Authority (DA)
+ How to Increase Authority Without Building Links
+ Do Outbound Links Contribute to Page Authority?
+ How to Acquire High Domain Authority Backlinks
+ Conclusion

Domain Authority Explained

Domain Authority, a number to determine the strength of a website, was developed by Moz.com. Similar to Alexa and Google PageRank (which was effectively shelved several years ago), this is a prediction that combines a variety of link metrics to create a score to show you how powerful, trustworthy and authoritative your website is.

As more and more webmasters begin to pay attention to this number, many have wondered what it takes to increase their score. Before we jump into the steps, let’s take a quick glance at how this formula works.

In the SEO world, domain authority and page authority are the biggest indicators for how well a page of your site ranks for a relevant query. Accordingly, search experts prioritize them above all else. For the most part, there’s overlap here—a strong domain authority will lend itself to each of your individual pages, and any actions you take to increase the page authority of a specific page of your site will likely also contribute to your domain authority (in a smaller way).

The factors responsible for increasing your domain and page authority are diverse, and sometimes hard to improve. For example, the age and history of your domain is a major influencer in how authoritative it seems—but you can’t just tack on years to your experience to give it a worthwhile boost. Instead, most ongoing SEO programs rely on inbound link building as third-party indicators that a domain is valuable. The idea is, the more trustworthy the links that point to your site, the more trustworthy your site will be.

(Image Source: Moz)

Domain Authority metrics report on domain performance rankings on Google search results. Moz Analytics campaigns as well as Mozscape API contribute to those rankings. Score compilation of over 40 signals, including reporting from MozRank, MozTrust and Mozscape web index inform Domain Authority correlation of rankings. Per Moz’s latest update:

Rather than relying on a complex linear model, we’ve made the switch to a neural network. This offers several benefits including a much more nuanced model which can detect link manipulation.

We have greatly improved upon the ranking factors behind Domain Authority. In addition to looking at link counts, we’ve now been able to integrate our proprietary Spam Score and complex distributions of links based on quality and traffic, along with a bevy of other factors.

These fundamental improvements to Domain Authority will deliver a better, more trustworthy metric than ever before. We can remove spam, improve correlations, and, most importantly, update Domain Authority relative to all the changes that Google makes.

Domain Authority Scoring Metrics

Domain Authority score indices are a 100 point, logarithmic scale. The more your score advances, the easier it is to improve it. Thus, growing a score closer to 100 rather than a score on the other end of the spectrum is more expedient. Comparison of search engine rankings offers a combined metric for aggregate performance modeling measure of your dedicated domain. The combined metric approach uses link scaling (i.e. linking root domains, number of links, MozTrust and MozRank) in reporting of a single score.

MozRank provides the global link popularity score for SEOmoz compares the ranking power or relative link value between URLs. With continuous updates, MozRank outperforms Google’s PageRank metric in frequency and precision. Average MozRank for a domain: 3.00.

The global link trust score for SEOmoz, mozTrust is measures link trust rather than value. The measurement between the distance of the seeded trust source on the Web, and a given page determines the trust score. Seed trust are generally recognized, lead institutions and organizations such as governmental departments, not-for-profit organizations, scientific associations and university websites.

Other link metrics include measurement of total links, external followed links, linking root domains, followed linking root domains and linking C-blocks. Metric analysis of total links reports on all links. With total links metrics, more than a single link from the same URL is still treated as a single page. External followed links are measured from the external root domains for pages on a domain.

Linking root domains are the number of unique root domains containing at least a single linking page to a domain. Followed linking root domains are the number of domains with at least a single followed link for any page page signaled from the root domain. Linking C-blocks or group domains are administrate clusters of domains and the links between them. More than one domain on the same C-Block indicates ownership by the same party.

How to Mobilize Domain Authority to Boost Website Performance

Users observe the top five pages linking a domain. Once anchor text and Authority metrics have been input, the client can request export of up to 10,000 backlinks, or access Open Site Explorer for additional metric reporting information and links.

Review of the top five most linked to pages to a domain allows a user to explore competitor content. Search for URLs with the most high quality links not currently redirected to the domain under your ownership (i.e. HTTP Status 404, 302). Identify the link strategies that will best work for your domain. Having knowledge of how competitor domain earn links, informs strategic link acquisition.

The domains with more link value are those that will rank higher in response to optimization, and convert value to other domains that require rankings. Application of Competitive Domain Analysis metrics such as MozRank and MozTrust, and linking data, analysis of the root domain or the root domains of competitors can be analyzed further.

Rankings for new keywords are indicated under the ‘Account Settings’ tab on the dashboard. The rankings schedule is displayed as a calendar with a day of the week posted to indicate that an attempt to collect rankings in the PM of that day will be made.

Domain Authority Reporting Analytics

The Domain Authority models predict search engine position. Rankings are updated periodically to capture changes in page position of a given domain. The search engine ranking algorithms update data about domain performance over time. Domain Authority offers on-demand reporting. The model also affords better accuracy than competitor metrics. Multivariate analysis features offered in Domain Authority create sophisticated graphical illustrations of requested computations.

SERP results can be manipulated in co-efficient analyses in queries about domain wide rankings. Taken further, comparative frequencies in linear regression report median performance of domains across time. Prediction of SERP ordinals is also availed in Domain Authority, for reporting of higher to lower score values. Domain Authority has the capability to report on large aggregate datasets. For instance, aggregate metric reporting on 10,000 SERP can be analyzed for comparison of a single or multiple domains.

Domain Authority accuracy ratings are said to be in the 70% range. While hardly a normal standard deviation from mean performance in the conventional sense, self-reporting by the application is actual rather than trending in comparison with similar search engine analytic providers. Best proximate scores to domain-specific link metrics are possible by eliminating keyword specific features (i.e. anchor text, and on-page keyword usage). Scoring will then report query-independent or non-keyword-based ranking inputs rather than random selection.

Most Web-metric analytics specialists agree that Domain Authority is the highest caliber predictor of all search engine ranking applications. Use Moz Domain Authority to track, score and analyze your website domain in comparison with those in the same sector of field. Application of link metrics to define a single, predictive score ensures that forecast of trends in domain performance makes better future results highly probable.

A machine learning model algorithm that predicts rankings across thousands of search results allows users to observe aggregate performance of their domain over time. The total tracking strength reported for a domain is derived from these results, and calculated in a single score. Domain Authority metrics account for fluctuation of those results, as well as competitive reporting as a measure of SEO campaign performance.

On-demand, daily reporting is part of the Domain Authority analytics feature, allowing for thousands of links per domain. Domain Authority reports on rankings across clients once per week. Each domain has an assigned reporting day that coincides with the first day that a Domain Authority campaign was set up. The reporting day is static and cannot be altered.

For more information about Moz Domain Authority Scoring and other Moz software products, visit: www.moz.com

How Often Does Moz Update Domain Authority Metrics?

Link analysis data in Domain Authority taken directly from the SEOmoz Mozscape index which is updated every 3 to 4 weeks. However, now Moz is updating their DA metrics in real-time, as links are recognized. The Mozscape index populates the data field with key information in the SEOmoz Web App for each campaigns. Moz tracking in Domain Authority offers result on the top 50 rankings. Although there is some delay in data population updates due to the now over 20,000 campaigns currently tracked in moz tracks, users can also obtain new data from Open Site Explorer.

Domain Authority is a marketing analytics software designed to assist in improving website domain and SEO advertising search engine ranking performance. Improve social media outreach, and increase brand awareness connected to your domain with Domain Authority’s compendium of Web-based power analytics tools. Improve the position of your domain across search engines with Domain Authority.

Moz members can join the 300,000+ community of SEO marketing specialists and Web analysts to find out more applications for Domain Authority scoring. Members have advice to Moz support services, as well as industry experts in a Mozinar. Benefit from knowledge sharing about Domain Authority scoring and reap the most rewards from reporting of domain performance against competitors.

How to Increase Domain Authority

Moz.com uses more than 40 signals in their calculation to come up with a number. Here are some factors to keep in mind:

• The age of the domain
• The types of backlinks
• Domain history
• How often content is added
• PageRank

Based on a zero to 100 scale, you’re going to have to understand that it will be a lot easier to boost your score from 10 to 20, then it is to jump from 60 to 70. Since this number is created on a range of variables, it’s essential that you focus on producing quality content and not looking for a quick trick to raise your rank. As time goes on, your score should slowly rise if you do things the right way.

To get you started, here’s what you can do to increase the domain authority —

Start Networking

No matter what industry you’re in, there’s going to be a good chance that there’s a website that’s better than yours. Instead of looking at it in a bad way, consider turning this as a positive experience.

When you network with others on the web, this is a great way to develop a long-lasting relationship. With this relationship, it will give you the chance to guest post, get your name out there and who knows; they may even follow you on social media networks.

To strengthen these networks, consider doing the following:

• Praise their work
• Ask them for feedback
• Share their work
• Ask them to share yours
• Contribute unique content
• Offer help

Natural Link Building

Long gone are the days where you can blast 1,000 links to a shady network and hope for the best. Today, you’re going to have to market your website in a legitimate way. While this strategy has always worked, many people want to find the shortcut to do so; this isn’t something you want to do.

When building a natural link, focus on getting a link from reputable resources, such as a:

• University
• Library
• School
• Newspaper
• Resource Page

When reaching out for links, just remember that people only want to link to websites that offer value. So if your website is lacking on the credibility side, you may want to build up your library of content before reaching out.

When building these links, personally email the person in charge. With your email, let them know why your website deserves a spot on their resource page.

Also, another tip on finding natural resource links is by looking for broken links. If you find a broken link on a resource page, email the webmaster letting them know the link is broken. In exchange, let them know that your resource could be a great alternative to fix that broken link. To find these broken links, a search for “404 not found + resources + your niche” could yield some quick results.

Guest Post

A popular way to build natural links and network at the same time is by “guest posting.” This is the process of reaching out to other websites offering a unique piece of content. At the end of your article, you add a simple byline linking back to your website. If this is done right, you will find endless opportunities on the web.

To find guest posts, a simple search online can yield some wonderful results. For example, searching for “guest post + your topic” could show thousands of results. When submitting your proposals to various blogs, just make sure that you’re personal and offering a unique proposal.

Social Networks

Unlike the past, Twitter and Facebook have paved the way to share valuable content on the web. Since Moz.com is able to track shares, retweets and social media activity, it’s more important than ever to start being active here. By getting active on social media networks, this is a great way to engage with your audience, build a community and share your valuable content. If you don’t have any social profiles, it’s important to become active today.

Write High Quality Content

This tip has been stated over and over, yet people still refuse to follow this golden rule. If you don’t create valuable content, people won’t want to share it. If you take a look at any website that has a high Domain Authority score, such as ESPN, Facebook and Fox News, you will realize that they have a high score for a reason.

Websites that generally have higher scores often have compelling content that is unique, not found anywhere else and is shared by hundreds, if not thousands of their visitors. When creating your content, don’t stop updating. Today, Google is starting to reward websites that continue to update their website with valuable content.

Answer Questions

Quora, Yahoo! Answers and various message boards on the Internet allow you to leave a backlink if it’s related to the topic. While you don’t want to spam these resources, this is a great way to not only build backlinks to your website, but network, build your brand and draw in traffic.

Take your time to find people who are seeking answers to your question. If your answer is valuable and credible, most websites won’t mind you promoting your link. Even if these links have a “nofollow” attribute, it can still help you build your traffic and brand.

Let it Age

While this one is out of your control, you have to understand that your Domain Authority will rise over time as your website ages. Since your age plays a vital role with any search engine metric, it’s important that you register your domain for a long time and continue to develop your website over time. As time progresses and you develop trust with the search engines, your score will slowly go up.

Consider Paid Options

Using PPC and social media ads is a great way to build your brand. For example, if you were to advertise on Facebook or Twitter, this could get people to like and share your content. Like it was mentioned above, this is a great way to develop great social signals.

Build Your Brand

When you build your brand, try to think about more than just building links. If you can, consider offline marketing methods, such as:

• Advertising in the local media
• Hosting an industry event
• Send out awards
• Write for magazines or newspapers

Developing a brand offline is a great way to get people talking about your website on social media networks and searching for your brand name on Google. If Google begins to notice that more and more people are searching for your brand, this is a signal that shows search engines that you have a potentially strong brand.

How to Increase Domain Authority Without Backlinks

Without link building, how can you increase your domain authority, and by association, your search ranks? Fortunately, there are several alternative strategies that can boost your domain authority just as much as—if not more than—a traditional link building campaign.

Creating Viral Content

Your first option still involves link building, but in a much more organic way. Rather than building any links directly on outside sources, you’ll be calling upon your audience to do all the work for you. The goal here is to produce a piece of content with a high potential to circulate virally—that means it’s highly informative, entertaining, shareable, and practical—and share it to a wide audience. Those audience members will share your content in turn, and eventually, it will catch the attention of several dozen (if not hundred) external sources. Those sources will link to you as a credit, of their own accord, which will pass ample domain authority onto you without ever having to get your hands dirty.

Brand Mentions

Google also considers mentions of your brand name on external sources when calculating domain authority. In a sense, you can consider brand mentions to be a milder form of external links. Because brand mentions do not trigger any spam-related red flags to Google, it is much safer to build brand mentions on external sources, and you can therefore use them as a simple substitute for your traditional link building strategy. Capitalizing on the same high-authority, industry-relevant sources, you can post occasional brand mentions to boost your domain authority, and you can also use nofollow links to attract referral traffic to your brand without upsetting any search bots. This works both for company brand names and branded names of individual products.

Navigation and Interlinking

If you’re looking to increase your domain authority, don’t exclusively incorporate offsite tactics. Onsite SEO implementation is just as important for building authority. For example, the navigation of your site has much to do with how much authority Google evaluates your site to have. Sites with a clear, simple, and intuitive navigation will have a higher authority than sites with a confused, jumbled, or overcomplicated system. This is because Google values high-quality user experience above all other factors when ranking websites. You can also increase your domain authority by interlinking your content; the fewer clicks it takes to get to any one page of your website, the better. You can improve this by implementing user surveys, finding ways to consolidate your pages, and redesigning your site to be more intuitive to the average user.

Historically Great Content

Everyone knows that great content is essential for SEO, but don’t forget the fact that one piece of content doesn’t trigger an increase in domain authority. Authority must be gradually earned over time. If you produce high-quality content, consistently, over the course of months and years, your domain authority will flourish. Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut for this. Domains that have been around for decades will always have more domain authority than similar sites with a shorter history. Stay patient and committed to your domain.

Remember, as long as you’re posting on highly authoritative and industry-relevant sources with a diverse and appropriate style of links, you shouldn’t have to fear a penalty from link building. Link building can still be a valuable strategy, especially if it is used in moderation and in conjunction with the authority-building strategies listed above. The more diverse your strategies are and the more effort you spend trying to improve user experience, the more you’ll be rewarded in search engine visibility across the board.

Do Outbound Links Contribute to Page Authority

Google evaluates the vastly complicated interrelationships between websites, and uses this data to decide which ones are most deserving of higher ranks. We all tend to focus on inbound link building, since our domain is the one we’re concerned with, but what about outbound links? What about a domain’s external linkage to other sites? Are they a significant factor to page and domain authority as well?

User Experience Factors

First, let’s take a look at the practical reasons why you’d want to include outbound links in the first place. Isn’t it better to keep your users on your site for as long as possible?

Actually, outbound links are indicators that you’ve done your homework, or that you’re meaningfully connected to a given industry. For example, you might cite a major study that was conducted by a leading authority in your industry, or make reference to a professional blogger’s article on a semi-related topic. This shows users that your content is well-researched, shows that you’re well connected, and gives them additional, valuable information they can use to make informed decisions. In short, when used as citations, references, and “further reading,” outbound links improve your reputation.

How Outbound Links Can Help SEO

Now let’s look at outbound links from an optimization perspective. When Google indexes your pages, it does consider the types of links on each page. There are a few ways it takes these into considerations:

• Authority. Linking out to high-authority, trustworthy sites tells Google that you do your research, and that your content has a trustworthy basis. Accordingly, pages with lots of trustworthy links are seen as more trustworthy by extension.
• Relevance. The relevance of your links also comes into play. Google uses your link relevance to gain further understanding of your site’s purpose, industry, and niche. Include links to sites within your industry, or ones that have a particular relevance to your company, to strengthen the accuracy of your associations.
• Function. Google wants to see links that add value to users’ experience. If you just feature a list of full-URL links, it won’t look good for you. Instead, embed links in hypertext for meaningful citations in the body of your work.
• Diversity. Finally, don’t just link to one or two sources all the time. The more diverse your outbound link profile is, the more authoritative you’ll seem.

Do these considerations look familiar? It’s because they’re almost identical to how Google considers inbound links. All these factors can influence the power an outbound link has, just like an inbound link. However, be aware that since you have more control over outbound links (i.e., they don’t serve as third-party indicators), they tend to carry less power.

How Outbound Links Can Hurt SEO

Unfortunately, there are also a couple of ways your links can damage your page and domain authority:

• Poor associations. If your outbound links point to irrelevant sources, or if they direct users to spam sites or other low-authority sites, it will bring down your site’s authority just as high-authority links would increase it.
• Overabundance. Google used to have a rule that it wouldn’t index a page if it had more than 100 outbound links. This isn’t the case any longer, but Google still cautions users to use links reasonably. If you feature too many outbound links, it may think you’re a link scheme or spam site. If you want to include more links but want to play it safe, you can always use a “nofollow” tag to prevent Google from considering it.

Best Practices and Takeaways for Outbound Links

Now that we’ve looked at both sides, we can compile a list of handy “best practices” for outbound links on any given page on your site:

• Include multiple outbound links to back up your sources and provide additional information for users.
• Keep your links authoritative and relevant, and diversify your pool of external sources.
• Try to limit the number of links you use to avoid triggering any red flags, and use nofollow links if necessary to mitigate your risk.

With these best practices in place, you’ll see better results for each page on your site (as well as your overall domain). However, this strategy is not as powerful as others in the realm of SEO, such as link building and ongoing content marketing. Keep it as a useful tool in your arsenal—but don’t prioritize it higher than it needs to be.

How to Acquire High Domain Authority Backlinks

Link building, one of the cornerstones of SEO, has received much of the spotlight since the release of Google Penguin. It remains as one of the most valuable tactics for gaining not only high rankings in search, but also driving significant amounts of traffic.

But since the rollout of Google Penguin, what has changed?

While backlinking is not the be-all and end-all of SEO, it’s still very important. It became the subject of abuse because of many black hatters, but there’s nothing in the SEO manual that says backlinking has diminished in value and importance.

The rule for backlinking today
A lot of backlinking strategies before the advent of Penguin seemed too manufactured. Online marketers competed ruthlessly for Google’s precious first page despite Google’s guidelines on quality.

When Google Penguin stepped in and flexed its fearsome authority, that got everyone’s attention. Sites that had natural linking profiles were rewarded while those that had been deliberately over-optimized experienced a significant drop in search rankings.

Now, Google and other major search engines are keeping a closer watch on who’s paying attention to the new SEO game. The search engines look for both the quality and variety of backlinks that point to a site. If your backlink strategy isn’t working, it’s likely due–at least in part–to some of these factors.

Directories and high PR backlinks
Links from high PR sites are still awarded value by the search engines. High PR sites continue to play a vital role in search ranking. But when Google Panda sought to penalize content farms, a lot of directories got hit as well and witnessed their PR decrease in rank.

This forced webmasters to think twice about distributing their material to content and article directories. The fact is that, while a lot of directories such as EzineArticles.com were hit hard, they still offer viable opportunities for backlinking and traffic.

If done properly, submitting your site to directories, and syndicating articles and other material to content directories, will give your site a significant number of backlinks that could boost your ranking.

However, here’s something worth mentioning before you fall into a fatal trap that could render your efforts meaningless: Avoid using software that automates your backlinking processes. Automating is bound to hurt your rankings over time.

In the past, using software to submit tons of content automatically to directories tended to save webmasters a large amount of time. These days, however, as search engines focus more on quality than on quantity, it’s better to submit high-quality links manually in smaller quantities.

So how do you create high PR backlinks?

First, The Main Content

Choosing a topic
When deciding on a topic, choose according to the following criteria:

• Topics you are very highly passionate about
• Topics about which you have considerable knowledgeable
• Topics around certain keywords that attract a substantial number of global searches per month
• Topics that are trending (you can use Google Trends to identify a good trending topic)

Write several articles around the topic you’ve chosen and be sure to write no fewer than 500 words. These days, search engines tend to prefer articles that consist of 500 or more words.

A note on including links to your main site: Include a resource section at the end of your article that includes an anchor text pointing to your site. But when you insert anchor texts, avoid using exact-match keywords. Vary the keywords that you use as anchor texts by using related keyphrases: brand your copy, and junk anchor texts such as “additional info,” “click here,” “check it out,” etc.

Article spinning
Now that you’ve written several main articles around a topic, it’s time to spin them to create additional versions of each of them.

By spinning, I am not advocating the use of article spinning software that spits out low-quality spun content. I mean taking a point from an article and expanding on it to create a different side of the story.

Repurposing articles
Don’t assume that articles are all there is to high-quality backlinking. A good way to spread your links across a vast range of directories is to repurpose your articles and even blog posts into other formats such as video, slide presentations, and infographics.

Take one of your most popular articles or blog posts and create several videos using either PowerPoint or Keynote. Submit the results to several video-sharing sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Facebook, and even MySpace. Be sure to include a naked URL link to your site.

Take the same articles and blog posts and convert them into a slide presentation and submit that to SlideShare.net. Or you can convert those same articles into infographics to be submitted to infographic directories such as InfographicsOnline.com.

Conclusion

There are no shortcuts when it comes to building your Domain Authority. By implementing these tips, you should hopefully be able to see an increase in your score over time.

Want more information on link building? Head over to our comprehensive guide on link building here: SEO Link Building Guide

• About
• Latest Posts

Sam Edwards

Chief Marketing Officer at SEO.co

In his 9+ years as a digital marketer, Sam has worked with countless small businesses and enterprise Fortune 500 companies and organizations including NASDAQ OMX, eBay, Duncan Hines, Drew Barrymore, Washington, DC based law firm Price Benowitz LLP and human rights organization Amnesty International.

He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize on and off-site SEO ROI through content marketing and link building.

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