Domain authority (DA) is a metric system that measures how well your website is doing in the search engine result. It measures the authority of the entire domain unlike page authority which measures the authority of a single page on the domain only. When you check your site with the DA Moz Domain Authority Tool, it will show you a scale from 1 (lowest) – 100 (highest). Sites with a high number of referral links like Wikipedia usually have high DA and rank on top of the search result.
Domain authority score below 10 is considered a poor score. Poor DA score is typical for a newly launch website. If you just uploaded your site, it will start with a DA of 1. For new websites, it is easy to grow the score from 20 – 35. Small business websites usually have a DA score from 25 – 50, which is considered good enough for a medium site. High authority sites would have a DA between 50 – 100.
Many webmasters like to check the DA to find out the ranking performance of their sites. But, the DA is only a number and you must know how to use this number to help your website to grow. For example, you can compare the DA of your site with the DA of other competitors’ sites. If your competitor has higher DA, you can use the SEO competitor analysis tool to find out why your competitor is doing better than you and try to improve in those areas.
There are over 40 factors used in calculating the domain authority. If you are thinking of improving your DA score, you should obtain more links and mentions from high DA sites. It is advised that you don’t purchase links as you will only get penalized by the search engine.
The backlinks should come from a variety of sources, for example, sites with different domain extensions and based in different locations. The sites that link to you must be relevant. Both the backlinks that are pointing to your site and the root domain are taken into account in the score calculation.
You can get more points if there are more time to the date of expiry of the domain. For example, if your domain will expire in 1 year, you can extend it by another 3 – 4 years. It may cost you some additional money to extend the domain but it can have a positive impact on your DA in the long term.
The internal link structure is another factor that affects your DA. You must cleverly link relevant content together so that the spider can follow through and index them. Each content should have at least 2 – 3 links pointing to other relevant posts. This will help to pass some link juices to other old posts.
From time to time, you should use online the backlink monitor service to check the backlinks. If you find any bad links, you must get it removed. You can use the Google Diavow tool to disavow the bad links so that Google will not index these links.
Maintaining a high standard in your article can help with increasing your domain authority and search engine ranking. Every week, you can publish 2 – 3 long posts that are informational on your blog. To become an authoritative source, you must provide good content that reader will trust.