Updated July 13th, 2022
Table of Contents
Domain Authority: What is It & How Does It Work?
The one key factor that tells your website’s performance is none other than the Domain Authority. Bloggers and business owners seek to perpetuate their existing website ranking to the top pages.
The lingering fear of getting de-ranked becomes a constant headache if you don’t know where your online presence stands among billions.
Online Businesses can’t flourish in a vacuum, as it thrives on competition and if you don’t know how much of your content is visible to the readers you can’t calibrate your strategies to outrank others in your niche.
You can’t even forecast your position for the upcoming years which greatly affects your business strategies. A poor strategy means you are going to lose your ranking on SERPs anytime.
What is DA?
Domain authority as defined by Moz is the factor that shows the likelihood of your website ranking. Moz is the first Seo tools provider that introduced this concept to others.
It encompasses almost 40 Seo factors linked to a website. Combining all these factors and applying Machine learning algorithms to them, Moz gives a DA score ranging between 0 to 100.
Is DA an absolute metric to know your ranking?
NO, it is a relative term so it shouldn’t be taken in oblivion. Since it represents the healthy competition among different websites in the same niche, so you cannot say it is an absolute term.
Putting it simply, your website has a DA of 60, and your competitor has a domain authority of 61. Then your rival will have better chances of appearing when searched.
Although your website has a DA of 60, which seems a big number when compared to a total of 100, your DA is lower than your competitor.
What is the difference between DA and PA?
Domain authority tells the overall ranking score of a website whereas PA explains the individual page ranking in Google search results.
Both DA and PA are essentially for the same purpose: To predict ranking. But people often get confused because they mix these terms with each other.
In other words, you say that this age of your website has a good PA score, that does not mean your website will rank on Google. Similarly, if all web pages have good PA scores then the overall DA score will be greater.
And individual webpage rank score cannot testify to the whole website authority score.
So, we can conclude that individual PA scores combine to affect the domain authority of a website.
Is domain authority a Moz factor or a Google ranking factor?
When we talk about the high ranking of a website we say that a website is appearing on the top search engine result page. What makes the website rank on the top Page?
It is what Google describes as good Seo that makes your content outshine in the eyes of Google. The main thing is, Search rankings are not as simple as it seems.
Google has been focusing on more than 200 factors to rank your content. However, Moz has allocated only 40, therefore, you cannot replace Google ranking factors with Moz.
But that does not mean domain authority is of no use. It is a convenient factor that gives you an idea of your ranking to your competitor’s ranking. Therefore, you should use a DA checker to know your website’s DA score. It’s a very useful tool that helps you track your domain authority score.
How DA affects your SERP/SEO ranking?
A DA score mainly focuses on your website’s linking profile which includes external links, backlinks, and linking root domains. Google also considers these factors as beneficial for Seo.
Its PageRank algorithm actually gives the websites with a greater number of links a boost in ranking. Therefore, these factors are worth using and should be focused on when gauging the ranking of a website.
So, Domain authority affects Search engine result pages as:
Good quality backlinks:
High-quality backlinks increase DA and result in Increased ranking. So, DA affects your SERP ranking indirectly. If you have low DA then, it would be difficult for you to do link building with high DA websites.
This creates a negative effect on your overall ranking. Since you can increase your ranking by linking with relevant websites, you cannot get backlinks from these websites easily.
Bad links affect your DA and your SERP ranking:
Bad links are considered as spamming and come under blackhat Seo. They are meant to fake the links to manipulate the ranking. It decreases DA and in return affects your ranking on top pages.
After the incorporation of the Penguin algorithm makes it more difficult to sneak past Google and rank on SERPs. Thus it affects your website’s DA and overall performance.
Do internal linking:
You can increase your DA by increasing the page authority of each page of your website. Sometimes, You do not have good DA so in that case, it becomes difficult to get links from high DA websites.
For that matter, you can do internal linking by connecting each page to one another. This gives a link juice to each page and increases your DA.
In this way, your ranking also increases because find more referring pages to your website.
Wrapping up:
Every blogger and webmaster wants to expand their business to reach the pinnacle of success. Online marketing through a blog is a wonderful idea to increase the breadth of any business.
For this purpose, they need to launch their website so that people notice their content.
But, the biggest impediment to their success is ranking. If someone searches for the products or services you provide on Google but your website does not appear then your success is still a far cry.
To realize this dream, you need to understand how Google ranks the content and how to measure your website ranking?
Hence, Domain Authority is considered a metric that helps you in this matter. It gives you an idea to know the modus operandi of Google.
The best thing about its score is that you can get an understanding of where you stand.
Thus you can easily predict your long-term marketing and other goals related to your business success.
