Are you itching to know how well your website will rank on search engines? Checking your website’s domain authority can give you insight into how much search engines trust your site.
What Is Domain Authority?
Developed by Moz, domain authority (DA) is an SEO term that quantifies how much search engines trust you on a 1 to 100 point scale. The higher the number, the more authority your site has. Domain authority is different from page authority in that it ranks your domain, not the individual pages.
How Is Domain Authority Determined?
Your number is determined from several metrics like:
- How popular your site’s links are.
- How trustworthy your site’s links are.
- What sites link to your site.
- How long your site has been around.
- How many URLs your site has
Remember, domain authority differs from how trustworthy your site is in that the metric that scores trustworthiness, MozTrust, calculates the “link “distance” between a seeded trust source on the Internet.” Meaning, if you link directly to a trusted source like a university, you will have more trust yourself. Domain authority merely takes this trust rank into consideration when scoring your site.
Domain Authority Is a Comparative Metric
However, even if you have a low domain authority that doesn’t mean that your website is bad—you can still provide valuable content and information. Instead, Moz recommends using domain authority and page authority together as comparative metrics to:
- Determine which links and pages in your domain are the strongest.
- Compare your domain to a competitor’s and see how well you are doing.
Improving Domain Authority
You can improve your site’s domain authority over time by taking care of your website and making sure that you have a solid, white hat strategy. Hiring a professional SEO agency can help you improve your domain authority by:
- Removing bad backlinks
- Developing a linking strategy
- Developing valuable, relevant content