Why Is Domain Authority Important To My Seo?

I tried finding good resources on improving your search engine rankings as I often get asked about how to make our SEO really effective. It’s surprising how many contradictory facts I found and I ended up not writing about it. Why? Even Google is very resistant to share concrete facts and the only message that is communicated is to “share quality content”.

The problem is, the only content I post or curate is quality content otherwise I wouldn’t be here! So what can we do to improve SEO? I came across the term Domain Authority which prominently appears on SEO blogs.

There’s no such thing as “Google PageRank” in SEO anymore and even Google confirms it:

It is visible in your Google Adwords account, but that’s only if you bid your SEA campaigns on particular keywords. Domain Authority is something you can measure and influence over time. It’s a website rank (hence the name domain) and not a page rank (see an article on Page Authority here).

It rates your entire website one a scale of 0-100 (100 being the best and 1 being the worst). The higher the domain authority of a website, the higher its ranking in search engines.

Check out Glamour page – they have a domain authority of 58 and a page authority of 1.


Domain Authority Formula

Moz calculates the DA rank for you. The actual algorithm is of course not revealed, however there are few metrics that we can influence: 

  • linking root domains
  • number of total links
  • MozRank

MozRank represents a link popularity score. It reflects the importance of any given web page on the Internet. Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank.

  • MozTrust

MozTrust is Moz’s global link trust score. It is similar to MozRank, but rather than measuring link popularity, it measures link trust. Receiving links from sources with inherent trust—such as the homepages of major university websites or certain government web pages—is a strong trust endorsement.


How to Use Domain Authority?

First, download the MozBar extenstion (it’s available for Chrome and Firefox). It’s a free plugin and it scans any domain you need. Type in your website and MozBar will show you it’s DA score. If the bar is switched on, it will also display on your search results page:

You can also use Open Site Explorer to check more information about your domain, e.g. the inbound links, their PAs and DAs, linking root domains, spam analysis and more. I scanned my blog and this is that it came up with: 


My DA Score is Low – Why?

Welcome to the club! My Domain Authority is in this case 11 and I suspect it’s low because:

  • It’s a relatively young page, and Google needs time to process it
  • It doesn’t have a lot of internal links 
  • There aren’t any external sites having good DAs referring to this site (yet)
  • The site doesn’t have good trust scores according to Moz

Where to Find More Resources?

Start with the basics and visit Moz: https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority or try out the Open Site Explorer. Check Moz SEO Beginner Guide for more tips. See this great infographic from SEJ showing where we need to pay attention to when it comes to increasing our Domain Authority: 

See the rest here 


Why Should I Care about Domain Authority?

It’s a great indicator of how healthy and good enough your website is for search engines. Although it’s not a direct metric from Google, it’s the only strong KPI that we can use to measure our SEO efforts. I’d advise looking at the local search – this is where domain authority of the website is very important. The website needs to contain relevant content to the audience at a particular location: 

Top 5 Local Organic Ranking Signals
  • Domain Authority of Website
  • Quality/Authority of Inbound Links to Domain
  • City, State in GMB Landing Page Title
  • Click-Through Rate from Search Results
  • Topical (Product/Service) Keyword Relevance of Domain Content

I hope this blog post was interesting and useful for those of you who want to take SEO in their own hands. Let me know what your score is and what are you doing to increase it! I’m curious to find out if high domain authority ranks help you capture more organic traffic!

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