Domain authority is a term that’s in practice since Moz has built an algorithm/tool to test the credibility of a website, in fact, it’s a test/measure of crawl frequency of a website or a webpage and they wanted to call it with a different terminology and that’s how domain authority and page authority came into picture.

Moz defined a way of measuring a domain credibility or web pages credibility and named it as domain authority and page authority, and everybody else considers this and uses it since page rank been removed by Google, there are many other tools available to check the DA and PA defined by MOZ.

History

Prior to domain authority, Google has a metric called as page rank and the lowest for the website is page rank “0” or not available and the highest is page rank of 10.

Google, after 2012 has removed it as webmasters or website owners, were biased towards their implementation and meanwhile there were few tens of software’s or application built to boost the page ranks unnaturally for the website and hence Google decided to remove the page rank measure completely for the website and that’s the time Moz domain authority algorithm took over the page rank concept completely to Domain authority.

What is Domain Authority?

In digital marketing the domain authority is the measure of the crawl frequency or citations (Backlinks) or credibility of websites and the measure of the same is calculated in terms of score and websites will have a domain authority in the range of 0-100.

• Zero is the lowest and the 100 is the highest
• Higher the domain authority better it is
• Higher domain authority implies good rankings for keywords on SERP
• Higher domain authority implies website with more citation
• Page rank by Google is replaced by the domain authority of Moz

Benefits/Advantages of Having Good Domain Authority

Crawl frequency is the primary element that’s considered at top most priority in digital marketing and many businesses spend a lot in improving the crawl stats of their websites, since the crawl frequency is usually understood as either page rank or as a domain authority every gives lots of importance in improving the score of the domain or webpage, as they believe

• Domain authority makes a website to rank up on to of Google SERP
• A higher Domain authority also implies the quality or health of the website
• Higher domain authority websites are most preferred by SEO professionals if they have to build backlinks from any other portal to their portal
• Higher domain authorities also imply quality citations or backlinks to your website
• Higher domain authority implies the dominance of a player against their competitors in terms of credibility, quality, and authority

“The algorithm/tools/plugins you use doesn’t update the DA on a daily basis and they do It once in a while and that’s when based on the crawl stats of your website the domain authority and page authority change”

How to increase domain authority of a website?

Since domain authority is the measure of crawl frequency the domain authority gets better with the improvement in crawl frequency,

Here are some simple ways of increasing the crawl frequency or Domain Authority/score

Increasing the MOZ Domain Authority & Page Authority

The 12 ways of increasing the domain authority of a website

1. Incorporate the high volume, low competitive and most relevant keywords in the content
2. Make sure the website is super fast
3. Make sure the page sizes are very small
4. Optimize all the image and content on the website
5. Have the great internal linking strategy
6. Keep publishing lots of content on your website on a regular basis
7. Build links from credible website or website those have good DA or Crawl frequency
8. Disavow the spam backlinks regularly
9. Have a well defined robots.txt file on your server
10. Make sure that you have an HTML sitemap compulsorily
11. Implement rich snippets for the respective content type
12. Implement XML sitemaps for all the URL’s

Wrong thinking around DA:

People believe only backlinks play role in improving the DA, the fact is its dependent on several other things as well along with backlinks also, it’s true you cannot completely rely on backlinks as it also needs to be addressing several other things that play a crucial role in DA changes and are as mentioned above.

what is a good domain authority score?

The upper limit is “100” and any website touching 100 is excellent, but then there is no such website currently that has got 100 domain authority.

How much domain authority is good for a website depends on the industry competition, the business competition, as the major benefit from the domain authority is allowing your website to rank up on Google 1st page and if the competition is very low you can achieve the first page results even when the DA is “0” or less than “10”

Anyways here are ways of figuring out what should be domain authority score of a website,

1. List down all of your competitors
2. Get the domain authority details of your top competitors
3. Monitor the keyword SERP for your domain and your competitors domain and if your competitor is doing well its an indication that you should have to maintain better domain authority and page authority compared to your competitor, E: G your competitor has Da of 20 and ranking in better positions for most of your keywords compared to your website then you should focus achieving a better DA compared to your competitor

Note: Better DA doesn’t guarantee first results always as being in the TOP of SERP is also decided by the CTR and user metrics and hence if a website lags in CTR and User metric and has Good DA it would still lag on Google SERP.

When can a domain authority/score can go down/fall:

Domain authority of a website can come drastically where is a drastic change in the crawl frequency and crawl rate of a website, which can either due to the internal issues, such as poor internal linking, no-follow in the meta section or no-follow attribute in the anchor tags or due to the load time and page size issues, or the external activities, such as loss of backlinks from credible domains, Backlinks from too many spam websites.

How to measure/Check the domain authority?

Domain Authority Checker

Measuring the DA by Moz tool is one of the best ways of finding the domain authority of the website. You can register for a Moz tool and check the domain authority there, alternatively the best way of using Moz DA tool is to install the MOZ toolbar extension for your browser, so that for every website you visit automatically it displays the domain authority and page authority, also if you are on the search results page you can find the DA and PA for all the result pages even before visiting those websites as shown in the below image,

Here is a domain authority checker tool you can use, MOZ tool

The Moz Domain Authority or the domain authority that Moz refers too can also be checked by using various other tools on the internet,

Here are some Domain Authority Checker tools references,

• Small SEO Tools- https://smallseotools.com/domain-authority-checker/
• Pre Post SEO – https://www.prepostseo.com/domain-authority-checker
• SEO Review Tools – https://www.seoreviewtools.com/website-authority-checker/
• Robin Gupta – https://www.robingupta.com/bulk-domain-authority-checker.html

Hacks to improve domain authority quickly:

As discussed in the above section of 12 ways of increasing domain authority you should be following them to improve your DA, but then if you want to see a quick progress consider doing the following,

• Build links from News websites
• Build links from websites which has very high DA
• Build links from websites which has very frequent content updates
• Publish lots of content on your portal on a regular basis
• On publishing a content compulsorily do fetch as google through your webmaster tools and submit the page and its direct links for crawl and index.

Be careful if you are building backlinks by considering DA as one of the key metrics, there are many scammers who boost their DA in very unnatural ways and in fact these websites mostly will be of very low quality or possibility of being penalized by search engines, these websites may also have lots of duplicate content, thin content or not worth content and hence you figuring out is the DA of a website valid one or not is very crucial.

In my next article, I will be discussing how to find the spam websites which has high DA,

The alternative way of understanding the domain credibility,

There is an alternative way of understanding the Domain authority or credibility through metrics such as Citation flow and trust flow, citation flow and trust flow of a website speak lot many things, when a website has good citation flow number it indicated the crawl frequency of the website is high and the trust flow number indicates the quality of the citations.

You can find the citation flow and trust flow by using a tool called majesticseo.com, click here to check the tool.

The article addresses the following queries,

• how to increase domain authority 2018
• what is domain authority
• how to increase page authority quickly
• moz domain authority
• Domain Authority checker tools
• how to increase domain authority moz
• how much domain authority is good
• The alternative of Domain authority checker

Ramya Teja

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.