Getting your website to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs) involves many moving parts, with one critical piece being Domain Authority (DA). If you Google Domain Authority, your top search result will be from Moz – the search engine optimization (SEO) experts credited for developing the Domain Authority score.
Moz Domain Authority was created as a way for a website owner to measure how likely their website is to rank on the SERPs on a scale of 1 to 100. The higher your Domain Authority score, the more likely you will rank on SERPs – and the better your chances of winning new customers.
If you’re going into 2022 still wondering what DA is and what it means, you have a lot to catch up on. But asking these questions is the first step to leveraging Domain Authority, learning how to increase Page Authority and maximizing the SEO Domain Authority tools and resources available to you.
In this blog post, we answer questions like: What is Domain Authority for? And what affects your Domain Authority score? We also delve into how to check Domain Authority. Further, we look into why some people find Domain Authority a controversial metric and what a good SEO Domain Authority approach looks like. We also give you the rundown on:
• What is Page Authority and Domain Authority?
• What is a good Domain Authority?
• What is a good Page Authority?
• How to increase my Domain Authority
• How to increase Page Authority
• How to build Domain Authority the right way
What Is Page Authority and Domain Authority?
Many technical factors are involved, but we’ll strip it down to the most important things you need to know. This is Moz Domain Authority and Moz Page Authority explained in the simplest terms possible.
What Is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority or DA is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that helps a website owner gauge their site’s “ranking strength,” i.e., how likely their website is to show up on search results. A machine learning algorithm makes predictions and creates a Domain Authority score ranging from 1 to 100 based on how often Google uses a given domain in search results. A higher Domain Authority score represents a greater likelihood of ranking.
What Is Page Authority?
Your website has several pages under one domain or subdomain. Domain Authority measures your domain or subdomain’s ranking strength, while Page Authority or PA is a score given to individual pages. PA reveals a single page’s ranking potential or performance, so more pages with a high PA naturally increase your DA.
So, What Is Page Authority and Domain Authority Good For?
The most crucial factor influencing DA is the number, quality and relevance of links to your website from reputable sources. These are called backlinks.
Backlinks help search engine algorithms trust your site, consider your pages high quality and qualify you for higher rankings. Having a high PA and DA means authoritative websites are vouching for you by linking back to you, and this “link juice” strengthens your own PA and DA.
Arguments Against DA and Moz Page Authority Explained
If you Google Domain Authority, you will likely come across several authors who don’t recommend using DA. This is because many SEOs consider Domain Authority to be unreliable, as DA is a third-party tool not endorsed by Google. However, Google representatives have vaguely shared that the algorithm considers “authority” – or DA-like metrics – in its ranking through several (undisclosed) signals and not as a score.
Moz was always transparent about the Google Domain Authority issue: DA and PA scores are not Google ranking factors. They only provide insight into a ranking signal that partially influences SERP rankings.
Even if some find Domain Authority to be controversial and increasing DA cannot guarantee improved search rankings, its methodology aligns with what Google looks for in legitimate and high-quality websites. At the very least, if your DA score improves, you can know you’re heading in the right direction with whatever strategy you’re using to build your Domain Authority.
Now, let’s discuss how to check Domain Authority and dig deeper into why a Domain Authority checker is valuable.
How To Check Domain Authority and Page Authority
Moz created an online Domain Authority checker, Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool, that reveals your DA and other useful SEO metrics, such as your top pages by links, top-linking domains and top-ranking keywords.
Source: Moz
Check Domain Authority in 3 simple steps:
• Open the Moz Domain Authority checker
• Enter a domain, for example, thriveagency.com
• View your DA and other useful SEO metrics
Source: Moz
Moz also created an online Page Authority tool called Link Explorer. This allows you to inspect individual URLs for your PA, DA, linking domains, top-followed links to your site and more.
Check Page Authority in 3 simple steps:
1. Open the Moz Page Authority checker
2. Enter a URL, for example, thriveagency.com/google-page-experience-guide/
3. View your PA and other useful SEO metrics
Source: Moz
The Moz Domain Authority checker and Page Authority checker are only two of many tools available – you should be able to check Domain Authority and Page Authority similarly and straightforwardly.
Now that you understand what both these metrics mean, let’s tackle two more important questions: What is a good Domain Authority? And what is a good Page Authority? This is necessary to know if your site is in a good SEO Domain Authority position.
What Is a Good Domain Authority Score?
Because DA is on a scale of 1 to 100, it’s easy to believe higher is better. But that would be an oversimplification. Be wary of this interpretation because Moz emphasizes that the metric is relative.
Well-known sites like Google and Wikipedia naturally dominate the top end of the scale because they have high-quality backlinks in vast numbers. So, it’s also natural for websites with a smaller audience and fewer backlinks to have a lower DA.
This is important to understand because the question of how to increase Domain Authority and how to increase Page Authority is not about how far you are from 100. If you’re wondering how to raise Domain Authority, know this: You need to ensure your DA steadily increases relative to your competitors.
According to Moz, “DA is best used as a comparative metric when investigating the sites within your target SERPs that may have more powerful link profiles than you do – your true competitors.” So instead of asking how to get your score closer to 100, your main concern should be: What is my Domain Authority score compared to my closest competitors?
How To Build Domain Authority – and Leverage It
Let us emphasize this – the answers to what is a good Domain Authority? and what is a good Page Authority? are the same: There is no benchmark for a “good” DA or PA, and you evaluate how well your site is doing based on your unique competitive landscape. But, aiming for a high Moz Domain Authority is good because it increases the likelihood your site will rank on the SERPs.
A lot goes into how to raise Domain Authority, but the bottom line is to win links from other websites. The goal is to have a strong backlink profile – increase the number of backlinks to your site, target high DA referring domains that can pass on link juice or ranking strength to your site and drive traffic to your site simultaneously.
Some ways to leverage DA and PA:
• Analyze your historic Domain Authority. It’s equally important to check Domain Authority regularly and use historic Domain Authority to evaluate your year-over-year results. It will always be beneficial to track and analyze your online performance.
• Focus on your pages with a high Page Authority. Any “Moz Page Authority explained” article will tell you to optimize and promote your best-performing pages. You can even find out how much link juice was passed on to you from a referring domain by analyzing changes in your PA.
• Use data to improve your digital marketing strategies. You can study your pages with the highest PA, find patterns and make them work in your favor. You could push out a highly successful blog post to a broader audience or invest more in a marketing tactic that boosted backlinks on a particular page.
3 Practical Tips on How To Increase Domain Authority:
1. Consider Guest Posting
A website will likely link to you if there is a value exchange, and content is king in today’s digital age. Guest posting involves providing an authoritative site with a keyword-optimized article that includes a link to your website placed contextually in the content. Here, website owners have very little work to do in exchange for a blog post and are incentivized to agree.
Compared to posting an excellent blog post on your own site and potentially being quoted or used as a source (and earning a backlink organically), outreach campaigns or directly connecting with website owners is a much faster way to win links to your site.
2. Relationship Building
One of the best ways to impact your Domain Authority is to earn links from high DA websites, such as subject matter experts’ blogs, online publications and media outlets. Given that the most authoritative websites are likely prestigious, you can imagine it will take more than a simple email offering a guest post to capture their attention. Prospecting websites and building relationships help you pursue links that heavily strengthen your DA.
3. Quality Over Quantity
Search engines can tell good and bad links apart, so not every link to your site helps you. Relevance in terms of the topic and industry are some factors algorithms consider in evaluating the quality of your backlinks. You need to actively pursue good links and do backlink audits to remove bad links. You also need to ensure your outreach campaigns target sites that can pass on valuable link juice.
Getting Started on Improving Your Domain Authority
Link building, or the process of acquiring links from other websites (referring domains) to yours, is critical. Utilizing the Moz Domain Authority checker provides a way to measure the success of your strategies. You can also leverage other tools like the Domain Authority checker and Page Authority checker to improve your backlink profile.
Here’s a roundup of everything we covered:
• What is Page Authority and Domain Authority? Domain Authority is a score developed by Moz indicating how likely your site is to rank on SERPs on the domain level, while Page Authority describes the same on the URL level.
• What is a good Domain Authority score? The DA score is meant to be used as a comparative metric, but it’s good as long as it’s improving. You evaluate your DA score relative to your direct competitor’s DA.
• How to build Domain Authority: Building DA involves winning links from other authoritative websites to yours.
• How to increase my Domain Authority quickly: Employ proven link building techniques, such as guest posting, targeting high DA websites specifically and auditing your backlinks.
But if you want to know how to increase Domain Authority the right way? Start by getting the help of experts.
“A large part of your SEO strategy should be dedicated to improving your DA. However, you should invest a similar amount of time and resources in creating high-quality content and other tried-and-tested SEO tactics,” said Shannon Thammasiene, senior SEO director at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency.
According to Thammasiene, getting the caliber of links you need involves “relationship building, reaching out to relevant websites in your industry and earning it through genuinely great content,” which takes time. Working with industry experts speeds up this process and gives you extra hands needed to put in the consistent effort this strategy calls for.
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency is a full-service SEO company helping businesses of all sizes improve their search visibility since 2005. Our link building experts review your backlink profile, study your historic Domain Authority, analyze your competitors’ SEO position and put together a content-based SEO strategy to increase your Domain Authority.
We also offer SEO content writing, technical SEO, search engine marketing and any other digital marketing service you need to bolster your online presence and sales.
Contact us today to learn more about cost-effective SEO strategies and how our services can help you.
