Whether you’re an old hand at SEO or new to the field, it won’t be long until you hear the words “domain authority,” often abbreviated simply as “DA.” You’ll hear about this site’s DA, or that site’s DA – or even worse, your site’s DA.
So what is domain authority all about? What’s it mean, and how is it used?
Domain Authority: an SEO metric
At its heart, DA is a metric by, for, and about SEO. Search engine optimization techniques are all about improving a website’s rankings in Google’s search results. But how do you identify how good or bad a website is? After all, a website will rank differently depending on the exact term used in the search. Just because a site lands on page one for a particular search may not be a good overall indication of how strong or weak that site is.
SEO – it’s all relative
SEO is a relative game. That’s the dirty secret of any SERP (Search Engine Results Pages, meaning Google) analysis. Improving your SEO metrics relies on improving how your website does in comparison to other sites. To rank for a particular term you need to be better than your competitors. At the same time, some websites are clearly stronger or better websites, in a more concrete way.
A quality score
That’s where DA comes in. Moz, an SEO software company, created DA as an attempt to indicate the overall and comparative quality of a website. The “domain” indicates that the metric works for the entire website, not simply a particular page; “authority” is Moz’s attempt to quantify the strength of a domain.
The metric
DA is expressed as a number between 0-100. It’s a logarithmic scale; it’s easier to move a site from 30-40 DA than from 60-70. Moz doesn’t identify the exact formula used to calculate DA, but there are some general ingredients that are well-known. One of the biggest is the number of links to and from a website.
The importance of links to SEO shows clearly how DA works, even if the exact algorithm isn’t known. In general, the more links a website has (to and from), the better. But the authority of the linking site is important also. To really boost your DA, you’ll need links of high quality and in good quantity.
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How to use the DA metric
DA gives your website a quality ranking, but that’s not necessarily the most helpful in determining exactly how to improve your SEO. Wikipedia has an incredibly high DA – lots of high-quality links to and from the site – but you won’t necessarily be competing with Wikipedia to rank your website.
For that reason, Moz recommends that you use DA as a point of comparison. Find the keywords and areas of interest where you’re trying to rank, and then look at your DA and the DA of your closest competitors. That will tell you a lot more about how exactly to plan your SEO efforts.
Domain authority isn’t the only metric the SEO world uses, but it is one of the starting points for determining the SEO potential of a given website.
Anything else? Alternatives to Domain Authority
Moz isn’t the only company publishing an SEO metric. Here are some popular alternatives to DA.
Google’s PageRank
It isn’t surprising that Google had the original version of an SEO metric; they pretty much invented the whole SEO field, after all. What is a bit surprising is that PageRank Toolbar – the public PageRank metric – isn’t supported anymore, and hasn’t been since 2013. Google publicly retired their SEO metric, allowing others (like Moz, with DA) to step into the gap.
That’s not to say that PageRank is completely dead. Google still uses the ranking internally, but good luck trying to figure out exactly how. You might still see the odd reference to PageRank here and there, and that’s why. PageRank is gone, but not forgotten. And in its place came a number of commercial alternatives, like Domain Authority.
Ahrefs – Domain Rating
Ahrefs has its own DR – Domain Rating – to compete with Moz’s DA. To make matters more confusing, DR is calculated in much the same way, focused primarily on the quality of the backlink profile for a particular domain. The metric is even expressed the same way, as a logarithmic scale from 0-100.
Nevertheless, some people prefer the DR metric to DA, and vice versa. Ahrefs successfully created a competitor for DA.
Majestic Metrics
Majestic boasts a suite of tools for the true SEO nerds; among them is their Flow Metric, which purports to measure the whole network or “flow” of links between websites. There are actually several different metrics involved, which explains some of the appeal Majestic’s metrics have for hardcore SEO gurus.
Beyond metrics
So which of these metrics is best? At the end of the day, a metric is only a tool. Each one can be useful, but any good SEO approach needs to value real sites. That means prioritizing great content that draws traffic, regardless of what any particular metric says.