What is Domain Authority and Why It is Important For Websites
My article was originally published here: https://itechindia.co/blog/what-is-domain-authority/
Domain authority is a term very few are aware of except maybe the SEO specialists. Everyone though knows about SEO, especially if you are a business. Let’s put DA into the perspective of SEO.
Say you have a beautiful Persian cat and you have started writing blogs about her. You have used all the right keywords in your blog. In short, optimized it for search engines before you hit the ‘publish’ button and sent the blog out into the wide world of the internet. You are sure all those beautiful pictures you have added, along with ALT tags are going to draw in the readers. But then a few days later, you do a search for ‘Persian cats’ and your blog is nowhere on Google’s search result page 1 or even page 10. What went wrong? Instead, Vetstreet.com and cattime.com are in the top search results. Why is that?
Why is the domain authority (DA) of your website important?
Digging deeper into the top search results for my same example ‘Persian cats’. I took the websites which ranked at the top in Google Search and ran their website address through a website DA checker such as MOZ DA checker and it gave me surprising insights. The top result, VetStreet, has a domain authority of 68 (have a look at the image below) and that is way higher than my blog site.
Domain authority or DA as it is more commonly known is the metric that was first developed by MOZ to predict how likely a domain or website will rank in SERP (search engine ranking page) compared to competitors. Domain authority score is ranked from 1 to 100, with 100 being the highest score.
Let me right off the bat say that Google ranking factors does not use DA but Domain Authority is a good indication that your website is doing good with its SEO optimization efforts. Anyways, Google too looks at backlinks to decide on which website has a better authority and hence provides a more valuable answer to the user.
What is Domain Authority?
There are 2 main factors for Google ranking your website higher than others for a search term and these factors are Relevance and Authority. The first, relevance, is related to your web page itself — the content, the keywords and how relevant it is to the search term.
The second factor is a super important search ranking factor and that is the authority of your website. Is your website trusted by other websites? Have they shown their trust by linking back to your web page (and hence your domain)? This is called domain authority and it is measured by the number of links to your website from other sites — in short, it is calculated based on the number of backlinks that your domain has aggregated. Quantity matters, so backlinks from other sites are a vote of confidence, it says that your webpage has information that is important and that is why my website is linking to it. If hundreds of web pages link to your webpage then that is a signal to Google that your website is trusted. So, backlinks build credibility and that is why it is important that other websites link back to you, the more the better. Once again back to my earlier example, vetstreet.com has over 1.1 million backlinks and no wonder it ranks high.
Domain authority is measured by the number of links to your website from other sites — in short it is calculated based on the number and quality of backlinks that your domain has aggregated
The term Domain authority was coined by MOZ but there are similar terms used by other website ranking sites. For instance, authority score by SEMRush, domain rating by AHREFS, and competitive power by Alexa. One thing that is common is that they all calculate website ranking by the number of backlinks and also the DA of the website that is providing the backlinks.
What is domain authority score and does your website need to have a high DA?
Now that we are all clear on the importance of domain authority, here is what your domain authority score tells us about your website.
