Domain Authority (or ‘DA’ for short) is a metric created by Moz. The DA of a website is basically used to show the probability for it to show up in the SERPs. In the words of Moz itself, domain authority is defined as: “…a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs).”
The domain authority score of a website can measure from 0 – 100. Usually, websites with a DA of 50+ are considered to be authoritative whereas websites with a score of 20 – 40 are considered average. However, the ‘average’ domain authority can differ from industry to industry. For example, according to an online source, the average domain authority for websites in the media and publishing industry is 86.23.
Understanding Domain Authority: What is the perfect score?
There are two things that are worth noting when it comes to understanding domain authority. Let’s discuss them one by one. First of all, it should be kept in mind that domain authority is not a ranking factor in itself. Having a high DA does not have any technical benefit to the website. It is merely a metric that online users can use to understand the authority of a website. In other words, if a website has a good DA score, it does not mean that it will be favored more by the search engine. Rather, it is just a value that depicts its authority.
Second of all, it has to be noted that while the maximum DA score is 100, it is very difficult to reach it. Only the websites that are extremely popular (such as LinkedIn and YouTube) are able to get a score close to 100. Be that as it may, you should still aim for getting the perfect DA score (which is 100) for your blog. The point of mentioning the above was just to inform you that even if your efforts don’t seem to be paying off immediately, you should keep them up and carry on trying. You should also use a reliable online tool like this in order to keep track of your process.
With that said, let’s move on to discussing some ways and methods in which you can boost your domain authority and get it to 100.
How to Get the Perfect Domain Authority for Your Blog?
Here are some ways in which you can get the perfect domain authority for your blog.
Create an Authoritative Backlink Profile
One of the fastest and most effective ways of increasing domain authority is to build an authoritative backlink profile.
In layman's terms, that basically means getting high-quality backlinks from high-authority websites with the same niche and industry as yours. When your website has a lot of high-authority backlinks pointing to it, it is a message to Google that the reliability and integrity of the site is acknowledged by other high-ranking platforms.
In other words, backlinks are essential ‘tokens of confidence’ from websites that vouch for the integrity and authority of your site.
The more your site’s authority is acknowledged around the internet, the more it will be favored by the search engine. When it comes to backlinks, there are a lot of different types. Some of them are listed hereunder:
⦁ Editorial backlinks
⦁ Comment backlinks
⦁ Guest posting backlinks
Editorial backlinks are the organic links that are naturally used by other platforms and websites in their content without you having to make any sort of effort. These types of links are used by other websites when they want to cite your content or any statistics found on your site.
Editorial backlinks can give your site the maximum amount of link equity (or “link juice”) and they are the most difficult to get. The only way to get them is to publish high-quality and authoritative content on your website.
When your published content looks professional and reliable, people automatically start to cite it in their own blog posts and articles etc.
Comment backlinks are the backlinks that are left in the comment sections of existing blogs and websites. They don’t give as much link juice as editorial ones, but they can still help your site’s DA score.
There are many Guest posting sites list available that contain every niche guest post-selling site with their DA PA and contact detail.
Work on Improving Your Website’s Internal Linking Structure
Just as getting high authority backlinks from other websites can help to increase your site’s domain authority, so too can the internal linking structure.
Internal linking essentially refers to the action in which you add links on one page of your website that point to other pages of the same site.
When your website has a lot of internal links that point to its other pages, the search engine crawler can go through it much more quickly and efficiently. This, in turn, helps the crawlers to determine the relevancy easily. However, while internal linking may sound simple enough, there are a lot of different rules and conditions that you have to abide by in order to get the most out of it.
Here are some of them.
First of all, you should make sure not to add too many internal links around your website. According to Google’s John Mueller, the consequence of using too many internal links is that their benefit gets diluted. In other words, as you add more and more internal links to your site, they start to get less and less effective.
Secondly, you should avoid adding internal links where that appear annoying and disturbing to your users. For example, if you were to add a blue, underlined linked word or phrase right in the main banner text of your site, it would wreck the user experience. Your site’s retention rate could suffer, and you could get a lot of bounces.
The best way to use internal links is to add them in blog posts or in the general types of website text that are placed around various web pages. And even here, you should make sure that the link you add gives some sort of benefit to the reader.
Get Rid of Toxic Backlinks
Having toxic backlinks pointing to your website can be very harmful to its DA score. In fact, if you find that your domain authority is not increasing even after you make a lot of effort for it, it could be due to many toxic backlinks pointing to it.
But, before we go any further, let’s talk about what toxic backlinks actually are.
Toxic backlinks (or just ‘bad links’) are backlinks to your website that are found on spammy and low-authority sites.
From the perspective of Google, ‘low authority’ sites in this context can consist of:
- Sites that are not relevant to your niche e.g. if a site related to fashion is linking to an internet provider’s website.
⦁ Sites that are created only to give backlinks. So, in order to get the perfect domain authority for your blog, you have to regularly conduct backlink audits and remove toxic links from your site.
Conclusion
Having a nice and high domain authority is a symbol of authority for your website. Nowadays, when people have to judge the reliability and integrity of a website, they usually do so by calculating its domain authority.
In order to increase your domain authority, there are a lot of different things that you can do. In this post, we looked at some of them. Let’s recap them real quick before wrapping this thing up. First off, to boost your site’s DA, you should get high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites.
You should also improve your site’s internal linking setup. This is also a good way to increase the DA score. And last but not least, you should conduct regular link audits on your website, and remove any toxic ones that may be pointing to it.