What is Domain Authority?
Domain authority is a measure of the power of a domain name and is one of many search engine ranking factors. Domain authority is based on three factors: Age, Popularity, and Size.
SEO gurus Moz can be credited with the metric known as DA or domain authority. Moz’s own search algorithm gauges the quality of any given site based on a huge complex combination of factors including onsite and offsite, taking into account things such as diversity of Backlinking domains to come up with a score between 0 and 100. A brand new site, for example, will have 0 whereas a very high authority site might have 80/100. Domain Authority gives those working in the field of online marketing a useful metric by which to consider the apparent quality of any site.
Where can you Find Domain Authority?
Domain Authority metrics are incorporated into dozens of SEO and online marketing platforms across the web.
You can measure Domain Authority using Open Site Explorer or the MozBar, Moz’s free SEO toolbar. Moz incorporates Authority metrics into all Moz Analytics campaigns, as well as the Mozscape API.
How to check domain authority?
There are a few domain authority checkers available online which you can use to check your website’s DA. The first is the official Moz open site explorer where you type in your domain or sub-domain address, and it will show you the latest DA score.
First lets understand what creates good DA by understanding MozRank and MozTrust.
What is MozRank?
MozRank is measured based on the link profile of a domain. It is calculated for any webpage on the Internet based on the number of links pointing to the page.
Along with quantity, quality of the linking pages also plays a major role. A handful of quality pages linking to your website will give a better MozRank rating than many low-quality links pointing to your website.
MozRank is measured on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the highest. An average MozRank rating for a webpage on the Internet is 3.
What is MozTrust?
Like MozRank, MozTrust is also dependent on links. With MozTrust, however, what is measured is how closely you are connected to a trusted website on the web. For example, a government website or an .edu website are usually considered as trusted websites. If you are linked in one hop (a .gov site links to a site called “A” and site “A” links to you), then you are more likely to have a better MozTrust ranking. Think of MozTrust as a ranking of the link indicating the distance between your webpage and a trusted source.
MozTrust is also measured on a scale of 0-10, and you can increase your MozTrust ranking by getting links from highly trusted websites (Wikipedia, government sites, university sites, etc).
Factors which affect MozTrust:
What websites you link to: Always link to quality web-pages when ever possible, and don’t link to spam or illegal sites.
Domain registration info: It has been suggested by Rand that your domain registration info could also play a significant role in deciding the trust factor for your domain. If you have 10 websites with same or similar domain registration info, and 8 out of 10 are bad websites, it might make it hard for you to earn trust for the 2 quality websites.
User data signals: This depends on how users are interacting on the web, and is collected via various sources such as Google toolbar, Google analytics, free Wifi.
Domain age: Let your domain age as much as it can because the older it is, the better it is. You can’t do much about it, but try not to change your domain name again and again. If you are a BlogSpot blogger, it’s a good idea to use a custom domain name from the beginning.
Four factors have effect on domain authority:
- prestige of a website and its authors
- quality of the information presented
- information and website centrality
- competitive situation around a subject
Prestige of website and authors
Prestige identifies the prominent actors in a qualitative and quantitative manner on the basis of Graph theory. A website is considered a node. Its prestige is defined by the quantity of nodes that have directed edges pointing on the website and the quality of those nodes. The nodes’ quality is also defined through their prestige.
Information quality
Information quality describes the value which information provides to the reader. Wang and Strong categorize assessable dimensions of information into intrinsic (accuracy, objectivity, believability, reputation), contextual (relevancy, value-added/authenticity, timelessness, completeness, quantity), representational (interpretability, format, coherence, compatibility) and accessibile (accessibility and access security). Humans can base their judgments on quality based on experience in judging content, style and grammatical correctness.
Information and website centrality
Prominent actors have extensive and living relationships with other (prominent) actors. This makes them more visible and the content more relevant, interlinked and useful.Centrality from a graph-theoretical perspective describes unidirectional relationships, not making a distinction between receiving and sending information. From this point of view, it includes the inbound links considered in the definition of “prestige” complemented with outgoing links
Competitive situation around a subject
The domain authority that a website attains is not the only factor which defines its positioning in the SERPs of search engines. The second important factor is the competitiveness of a specific sector. Subjects like SEO are very competitive. A website needs to outperform the prestige of competing websites to attain domain authority. This prestige, relative to other websites, can be defined as “relative domain authority.
