What is Domain Authority?

Introduction

Domain authority is nothing new in the universe of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Yet, a lot of bloggers are not aware of domain authority and its importance. In this article, we present a detailed guide consisting of necessary points about domain security, tips on finding out your domain’s authority score, and some other relevant things that may be useful to understand.

Domain authority is among the key factors that determine how well your website is ranked by search engines. In earlier times, page rank was used to weigh websites. However now, page and domain authority are the main factors, when it comes to the ranking of a domain. It is essential for you to have thorough knowledge about this topic because it can help you in creating an authoritative blog.

What exactly is domain authority?

Created by SaaS company, Moz, domain authority is a metric that is used to rate a website out of 100, with 1 being the worst and 100 being the best. Therefore, if a website has a higher domain authority, its search engine rankings will be higher, as well.

Do not think that domain authority is a calculator for your SEO efforts. Instead, consider it to be a competitive factor against other websites or your competitors. Therefore, if you want to check who between you and your competitor is likely to get a higher search engine ranking, you can compare the domain authority scores of the two sites.

Domain authority comprises 40 ranking signals, for example, how many links point to that particular site, and how many linking root domains are there – basically how many different sites are linking to that website. Just like page authority is a metric for an individual page, domain authority is a measure of authority of the complete domain.

How to check domain authority?

If you wish to check your website’s domain authority, you can do it with the help of some domain authority checkers online. The most common one is the official ‘Moz open site explorer’ which displays your latest domain’s authority score upon typing a sub-domain or a domain address.

For those who use Firefox or Chrome browsers, it is recommended that they check their page authority and domain authority by installing the MozBar extension.

As mentioned earlier, there are more than 40 signals in the domain authority ranking factors, you can work on a few from today to improve your website’s domain authority.

In the next sections of this article, we will be discussing MozRank and MozTrust, and what it takes to get a good DA.

What is MozRank?

MozRank is calculated considering the link profile of a domain. You can calculate it for any website on the Internet, and the results will be dependent on the number of links directing to that webpage.

It is essential to note that it’s not just about the number of links – the quality of the links plays an equal role. This means that a lot of links pointing to your site may not give a high MozTank rating if they are ones of low quality. It is comparatively better to have a few but quality pages linking to your site.

MozRank rates your website out of 10, with 0 being the lowest. The average MozRank rating of websites on the web is 3. You should be aiming to have a MozRank that is above average for optimum results.

What is MozTrust?

MozTrust is also based on links, just like MozRank. The difference is that MozTrust focuses on how close your connection is to a trusted site on the Internet. For example, .edu websites and government websites are believed to be trusted sites, and you can have a higher MozTrust ranking if you are linked to them in one hop – for example, the .edu site is linked to a site ‘X’ and the site ‘X’ then links to you. Therefore, MozTrust is better considered as a rating of the link that shows the distance between a trusted website and your webpage.

MozTrust rating also ranges from 0 to 10, and it can always be increased by getting linked to trusted sites like university or government sites, or Wikipedia, etc.

Following are the factors that affect your MozTrust rating:

• The websites you link to

  You should not be linked with illegal or spam sites, rather choose more quality webpages to link to.

• Domain registration information

  Your domain registration info can have a vital role in determining the trust factor for your domain. For example, if you own 2 websites with almost the same domain registration info, and 10 of them are not trusted websites, then it might be difficult for you to get trusted for the remaining two websites that are high-quality.

• User data signals

  It is dependent on the way users interact on the web, and can be collected using multiple sources like Google Analytics and Google toolbar.

• Domain age

  You should aim to have your domain as old as possible because the higher the age, the better it is. The most you can do about this is to avoid changing your domain name time and again For BlogSpot bloggers, it is a good practice to have a custom domain name from the start.
  Read more on how to pick a good domain name.

Conclusion

In the earlier days, Google page rank was considered a factor for any site on the web, but there were flaws found in that system. However, on the other hand, a domain authority score is now the most trusted and widely used factor in determining the authority and ranking of any website on the Internet. It is a well-maintained system that is updated as new technologies are introduced. In case you just found out the importance of domain authority score, it is time for you to find it out by using any of the domain authority checkers mentioned in this article. If the score is not up to the mark, start putting in efforts to improve your marketing strategy and different aspects of your website.