What is Domain Authority (DA)? How does it work and how is it calculated? And what is Page Authority? That’s what this lesson of our SEO Academy is about.
If you want those answers, chances are you want to improve your site’s SEO. Good — you’re in the right place!
Let’s open with the definition of Domain Authority given by Moz:
“Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.”
In plain terms:
Domain Authority (DA) is a score — a ranking for search engines — with which Moz estimates how well a site will place on search results pages. It’s measured on a scale from 1 to 100, and the higher the score, the greater the page’s ability to rank on search engines.
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From PageRank to Domain Authority
Not so long ago Google PageRank was considered one of the most important metrics available to anyone in SEO. PageRank gave you the exact SEO value of a site.
As Wikipedia puts it:
“PageRank is an algorithm that assigns a numerical weight to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of measuring its relative importance within the set.”
All of which was excellent for SEO consultants and anyone working in the field. You could establish the SEO validity of your own site and of your competitors’, and build SEO strategies around those rankings. Note the past tense: Google decided to give PageRank less and less weight, stopped updating it, and eventually let it lose all meaning.
Today, talking about PageRank makes no sense at all.
After PageRank was sidelined, other metrics emerged for establishing the value of a website. The best known and most widely used of them is Domain Authority (DA), developed by Moz.
What does Domain Authority (DA) actually measure?
With Domain Authority you can measure two things:
- the quality of your own website;
- the quality of the sites you earn an inbound link from through link building.
These measurements are useful to SEO consultants and SEO agencies, but also to their clients, who can use them to judge the work being done.
Say you want to hand a link building project to an SEO consultant or an SEO agency: you can assess their work by looking at the Domain Authority of the sites the backlinks come from. If the DA of those sites is low, they aren’t doing a great job.
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How is Domain Authority calculated?
Domain Authority is a score, as we said from 1 to 100, calculated by Moz on the basis of:
- the quality of the domains linking to your site;
- the number of domains linking to your site;
- the number of inbound links (a single domain may send you several links);
- MozRank;
- MozTrust;
- other factors Moz doesn’t specify.
So broadly it’s calculated from the number of backlinks your site has and the SEO quality of the pages the site is made of — that is, the quality of the on-page SEO work that has been done.
Other factors that feed into the DA calculation are:
- size (how much content the site has)
- age (how long the site has been published)
- popularity (the number and quality of inbound links)
How to check Moz Domain Authority
You can check Moz DA in three ways:
Take a look at this video from Moz — it’s genuinely interesting and explains how, and how much, to use Domain Authority and Page Authority:
How to increase Domain Authority
Here we are at the part you’re probably most interested in… How do you improve your site’s SEO? And how do you improve Domain Authority?
First, a word on how the numbers move: it’s far easier to gain ground at low scores than at high ones. Lifting DA from 10 to 15 is much easier than going from 70 to 75.
Domain Authority improves as your site’s SEO improves overall. So:
- increase the number of domains linking to your site;
- increase the number of backlinks;
- improve the quality of those backlinks;
- increase the number of “dofollow” backlinks (nofollow backlinks aren’t much use);
- improve the page content, which should be:
- original
- properly laid out
- readable and easy to follow
- useful to the reader
- up to date
- rewrite content on the basis of keyword research;
- enrich content with images and video;
- improve the SEO structure of your pages (H headings, SEO title, SEO description);
- improve the site’s code;
- improve the site’s speed.
Image from moz.com
Page Authority
Everything said about Domain Authority applies to Page Authority (PA) as well, and it too is scored from 1 to 100.
Here’s the Moz definition:
“Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engine result pages (SERP). Page Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.”
In plain terms: Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by Moz that indicates how well one specific page will place in search engine results. It runs from 1 to 100, where a higher score means a greater ability to rank.
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered what Domain Authority is, how DA works, how Domain Authority is calculated and how to improve it.
We’ve also touched on Page Authority (PA).
At this point you have everything you need to improve your site’s SEO. All that’s left is to try it!
Stay tuned and keep following us — in the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
If you need help improving your site’s Domain Authority, Page Authority or overall SEO health, get in touch by filling in the form.
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