DA (Domain Authority) is a SEO metric developed by MOZ.com which shows authority of a website in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Generally this SEO factor is determined by the number of links or external reference domains that point to the web page in question.
It is the relevance of that domain or web page with respect to the rest of world web pages. In other words, it is the popularity of that website on the internet. Domain Authority scores ranges from one to hundred.That is, the more links you get for your web project, the more domain authority you will accumulate and the better positioning you will receive. It’s that simple.
Advantages of the authority of your website:
Logically, improving this metric will improve your web positioning.
In many cases, SEO experts have claimed that domain authority (backlinks received) accounts for at least one third of an SEO strategy.
As you will suppose, a 33.3% influence is something too relevant to not take into account in your digital marketing strategy. However, this is not the only reason why you should improve the authority of your website on the internet. By improving your domain authority you will also get:
An improvement of your visibility
The more authority, the greater the power in Google, the better positioning and therefore the increase in visits and SEO. It’s simple, the more links you get to your website, the more chances you’ll have to appear in Google’s TOP10.
This will increase the number of possibilities that users end up entering your website through Google or at least take it into account as entering the Google TOP 10 your visibility on the Internet will increase by itself.
Your website will be visited most assiduously by Google
The greater your domain authority, the more likely you are that the Google spider will visit your web and cache it. This is a positive SEO factor since the more times you visit the Google bot your web page the more chances you will have that your website reaches the top positions.
Higher level of tracking means more authority on the Internet and this is generally linked to an improvement in Google positions.
How to know the domain authority?
There are different free SEO tools on the market to know the domain authority of a web page.
However, it is best to take into account these metrics in a relative way since the only thing these metrics will do is give you an overview of how the web authority of your domain is.
Therefore, in any case, none of these tools will give you exactly the authority of a web page. For this reason, combine the metrics of all the tools to have a global vision of the authority of your domain.
Let’s see some of these tools:
DA or Domain Authority of MOZ
- Moz.com is a tool which is par excellence to measure the authority of a web page.
- To do this, you simply have to download your extension for Google Chrome and with it with it you will install the Moz Toolbar that will tell you:
- Domain Authority (DA) of your web page. That is, the authority that has the domain on the internet.
- Page Authority (PA) of the page you are visiting. That is, the internal authority of that page individually.
- In addition, with this tool you will be able to see in two simple clicks which links are do follow and which are no follow within the web page that you are visiting.
- Link Explorer by Moz.com
- Previously Open Site Explorer (OSE) by Moz.com was the tool to check the Domain Authority (DA), few months back Moz has launched a new tool called Link
- Explorer where you can check the Domain Authority (DA)
DR or Domain Rating of Ahrefs
Again another indicator that will give you an idea about how you are doing things at the SEO offpage level.
This tool is especially interesting when it comes to viewing your link profile so if you are looking for an indicator based mainly on links there is no better indicator than the Domain Rating (DR) of Ahrefs.
As if this were not enough, the Ahrefs tool will place you in an internal ranking of the tool itself that will also serve to make you an idea of how you are doing things at the level of links.
Among the main indicators offered by this tool are:
Domain Rating (DR) which shows the strength of your link profile. That is, this metric will tell you from 0 to 100, as is your domain authority.
URL Rating (UR) shows the strength of the page you are studying individually. It would be the replica to the PA metric of MOZ.
CT or Citation Trust of Majestic SEO
- Majestic SEO is next to MOZ another great tool to measure the SEO authority of a domain.
- This indicator is based mainly on the number of links your website receives and the quality of these.
- The results of Majestic SEO are very reliable to get an idea about your link profile. For this, you will simply have to pay attention to the following metrics:
- Citation Flow (CF) This indicator is based on the number of incoming links to your web page. That is, show your domain authority.
- Trust Flow (TF) this metric indicates the quality of the links that your web page has received.
- TIP: Do not get obsessed with authority indicators
- Many people tend to obsess over these types of metrics, in fact, it happened to me.
- These indicators do not always have the absolute truth. There are other factors not measurable by these tools, such as the SEO On-Page that will also influence the positioning of your website.
- For this reason, not to have a greater authority of domain you are going to be over other web pages in Google. There are many more factors to take into account in the positioning process.
- Therefore, this kind of indicators are good when it comes to following an offpage strategy but they will never be a definitive indicator when auditing the SEO web positioning of a web page.
How to improve my domain authority (DA)?
The answer is simple, getting dofollow links to your online project. The greater number of links to your web page, the greater your domain authority will be.
However, as I have indicated previously, these must be dofollow since the nofollow links do not pass authority or link juice. Therefore, if you get links make them dofollow as much as possible.
Anyway, if you do not know how to differentiate between a link and another, it will be best if you use the Moz Toolbar that I have indicated previously. This tool will show you what type of link is (dofollow / nofollow) with a simple pair of clicks.
Now you will ask. Where can I get these links that improve my authority on the internet? Well, this type of links can be obtained through:
Links in profiles, comments and forums
These spaces will be the source of basic links that will improve your domain authority for free.
However, its quality is not very high and these links will simply serve to make a link building foundation to your project.
You can get these links in:
- Profiles in different web pages.
- Profiles in forums or signatures in forums.
- Comments on blogs.
- Purchase links
- This type of links will improve your domain authority since they will be quality backlinks and difficult to obtain.
- The only downside of this type of links is the price these backlinks can reach. Keep in mind that some of them can reach up to 200 euros. A price for nothing affordable to many pockets.
- On the other hand, in this type of purchased links you will have control over the entire process. That is, you will decide when, what and how you want the link.
- In general you can buy links within the different platforms in:
- Newspapers both thematic and general.
- Blogs or web pages with a theme similar to yours.
- Collaborations in exchange for links
- These types of links are those that will improve your domain authority for free. Well, it really will not be free, but it will be in exchange for your time.
- These types of links are achieved through WIN – WIN strategies. That is, through an exchange in which both parties win.
Within this type of links would be:
- The guest post or guest post.
- The exchange of links is not reciprocal.
- The change of services by links.
Domain authority vs page authority
As you have seen previously, with metrics such as Page Authority (PA) or URL Rating (UR) you can measure the unique authority that each web page has within a site. This metric is independent of the global of the Domain Authority (DA) or Domain Rating (DR) web page.
However, many people do not have enough in mind this individual metric per page and it is a mistake because if you increase it significantly this metric you can fight for the top positions of Google against other websites with greater domain authority than yours.
Therefore, if you notice that one of your pages is in the Google TOP10 and you want to position it in the TOP3, it will be best to get links to that URL to increase this PA or UR and in this way position yourself among the top positions of Google.
Conclusions
As you have seen throughout the post, domain authority is a fundamental factor in an SEO strategy. The higher the level of authority, the greater the relevance on the internet and therefore the better positioning of the web. For this reason, it will be essential that this SEO metric is better with links.
Anyway and despite the importance of this factor you should not forget that by improving this authority you will only be improving 50% of the SEO of your website.
Remember that SEO is based on SEO factors onpage and SEO offpage.
Therefore, no matter how much domain authority you have, many external links and a lot of relevance on the internet, if your website is not 100% optimized regarding SEO onpage, you will never reach the top positions of Google.
As you already know, SEO is the result of a global strategy, not everything is as simple as getting links and increasing your authority on the Internet. You must work many more aspects.And you, do you already know what is the authority of your domain? Do you have a strategy to improve your authority on the internet?