How does domain authority work?
Have you heard of a website’s domain authority, and page authority?
We’ll walk you through what both terms mean, how these authority scores apply to your website, and how you can go about trying to improve your domain rating score.
What is my domain authority?
Domain authority is a score created by Moz that tells you how well a certain page will rank, on a scale of 1-100.
The higher your score is, the better you’ll rank. That’s the theory, but it isn’t quite as simple as that.
Google has told us that the domain rating check isn’t their tool, it’s Moz’s.
So, should you bother with domain authority? Yes. It’s a big part of off page SEO.
What is the difference between domain and page authority?
Your page authority refers to the strength of a particular page on any given website. Whereas, domain authority refers to your entire website.
This is how to do a domain rating check
- Go to Moz’s domain authority tool
- Enter your URL that you’d like to test
- Hit ‘analyze domain’
- Get your results
How is domain authority calculated?
Moz calculates your domain authority based on different technical aspects. Here are a few factors that it reviews:
- How many domains link to yours – you’ll reap the benefits of the link juice of any ‘follow’ links from any domains that link to your website, like an editorial vote
- How many high-quality domains link to yours – you’ll want the quality of your backlinks to be strong, not spammy, otherwise Google will think you are spammy too
- The number of social shares that page gets – if your domain holds a strong name for itself with LinkedIn shares and lots of Facebook likes, this is a good signal
So, what’s a good domain authority score?
It has been said that anything above a domain authority of 60 is pretty good. But you’ll always wanting to be aiming to improve your score as the higher, the better.
So take this with a pinch of salt because, as mentioned, this is Moz’s scoring system, not Google’s.
However, Google does assess your website’s technical SEO to rank you accordingly, so it is important to improve your domain authority. There are lots of search engine ranking factors, and domain authority is a big one, from the quality of your link profile to the number of external links you have.
How to improve domain rating
There are lots of things you can do to help improve domain authority. The first step is to make sure you’ve got a solid off page SEO strategy in place. What do we mean? Here is a breakdown of the tasks to be implemented each month for your domain.
Create shareworthy content that will rank in the search engine results
The key to this is knowing who your audience is, what they want and being able to create the right targeted content to engage with them. People love valuable content, and if they like it, they might share it and link to it.
Visual displays of copy, like infographics, can be more likely to get a backlink than textual.
Do some outreach to get links, only from authority sites
There are lots of ways you can do outreach. Here are a couple of suggestions.
- Contact companies and websites who are linking to some outdated content, and provide them with an updated, more valuable, user-friendly piece of content to upload
- Alternatively, research any companies who might be linking to a broken link that they’re not aware of. Do the same strategy with your fresh content, and target obtaining a backlink.
Remove any spammy, toxic links
Even if you’ve not got many, these could be hugely hindering your domain authority score. If you see a drastic drop in traffic, or if you’re notified by Google, you could have toxic links to your website.
They could damage your website’s domain authority.
You can use Google’s disavow links tool to get them removed. Or, you can contact the website owner of the spammy link, if possible, and ask them to remove the link.
Log in to Google Search Console to see all of your links, under ‘Links to your site’.
Optimise your on page content
Domain authority and rating is all about the strength of your website, so you need to make sure each page is optimised to give the user exactly what they are looking for.
That means having a relevant, well-researched keyword plan in place, and making sure your content targets the users’ pain points and calls them to take action.
Implement a solid internal linking system
We know external links are important to add to your link profile.
But that doesn’t make the links on your own website any less critical.
If your user could easily get lost through sub category or blog pages on your website, and have to struggle through to return to the home page, you might need to re-evaluate.
Here are some tips on best practice internal linking to get you started.
Stick to white hat SEO
As well as the above tips, one of the best things you can do to improve domain authority is to steer clear from black hat SEO. Google rewards good, user-friendly websites and content, as part of its ranking factors.
So, fix your broken links and make sure your site speed performance is top notch.
Those are the basics of domain authority to better your domain rating
That’s some of the basic information if you wanted to get your head around domain authority and how to improve a low domain score, as part of your SEO plan.
Find out more about the basics of what SEO is and how to implement a solid strategy.
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