For those of you who have been in the world of digital marketing, Domain Authority (DA) is certainly a term that is quite familiar to you.
Many brands and businesses use domain authority as a parameter or metric to evaluate the results of their digital marketing strategies, especially on websites.
But do you really understand what is meant by domain authority? Is it important for you to improve these metrics? And can domain authority help you improve search rankings on Google?
Domain authority is indeed a very useful metric to find out the status of comparisons between your website and competitor websites. However, it should be emphasized that domain authority is not a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.
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What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority (DA) is a metric developed by Moz to predict how likely a website is to rank on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
The DA score ranges from 1 to 100. The higher the DA score of a website, the more likely it is to rank in the SERPs.
It is important to emphasize that Domain Authority is not a ranking factor of Google and has no impact on the SERPs at all.
However, this one metric is still a good indicator to help you improve your website’s performance.
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Today, many other SEO tools, apart from Moz, are developing similar metrics. Examples such as Authority Score on Semrush, and Domain Rating on Ahrefs.
How is Domain Authority Calculated?
Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating several factors including the number of links a domain gets and the quality of each link obtained.
Because DA calculations are based on machine learning, your website’s DA score will always fluctuate as the algorithm changes and the availability of data points.
For example, if facebook.com gets billions of new links, then every website that competes with facebook.com will experience a decrease in DA.
This is because the link profile from the Facebook website is increasing and ‘eating’ the available DA slots. As a result, other competitors’ websites have less space to increase their link profiles.
This is also the reason why increasing the DA score from 20 to 30 is easier than increasing the DA score from 70 to 80.
What is a Good Average DA Score?
In general, sites with a massive number of quality external links such as wikipedia.com or google.com are at the top of the DA scale. Meanwhile, a small business website with fewer inbound links will have a lower DA score.
A new website will always start with a DA score of 1. This score will increase over time as the backlinks it gets also increase.
Because DA is a metric that predicts a website’s competitive ability to get search rankings, the average DA score that is considered good is relatively dependent on the competitive landscape of the website industry.
Try to look at the Domain Authority of competitors’ websites and use the average score as your website’s DA score target. The more competitive an industry is, the higher the average DA score will be.
How Do You Know Your Website’s Domain Authority Score?
It’s easy enough to find out the DA score from your website. You just need to:
- Go to the Link Explorer feature of Moz.
- Enter your website URL in the search bar at the top of the page.
- Register your Moz account.
- Analyze your website data displayed by Moz.
What is the Difference Between Domain Authority and Page Authority?
Domain Authority and Page Authority are two metrics with the same concept but applied at different levels.
Domain Authority measures the ability to get search rankings from a domain or subdomain. While Page Authority measures the ability to get the search ranking of an individual page.
Conclusion
From the explanation above, it can be concluded that Domain Authority is a very useful metric to find out the competitive landscape of your website in getting search rankings on Google.
But many are still mistaken that by increasing the Domain Rating, the search ranking will also increase. In fact, this is not the case because DA is not a determining factor for search rankings on Google.
Source: Moz.
