Discover Domain Authority and how to use it correctly for your website SEO

Domain Authority is a way of determining how well a site will perform in search results. It takes into account a range of different factors to create an overall score that can then be used as a way of either monitoring the ranking strength of the website over a set period of time or comparing one website to another. Although Domain Authority isn’t a Google metric it can be an incredibly useful tool when it comes to insight and SEO.

Domain authority – the basics

• Domain authority is scored on a 100-point logarithmic scale
• Factors that can influence Domain Authority include linking root domains and inbound links
• There is no specific score to aim for – it’s more about ensuring that your site has a ranking ability that exceeds that of competitors
• Domain Authority is designed to predict an entire site’s ranking ability – this is different from a Page Authority metric, which focuses on individual site pages
• Domain Authority is a comparative metric. It is useful in comparing the link profiles of one site against another, as opposed to being an immovable value for scoring site SEO

What is Domain Authority built on?

The basis for the Domain Authority metric is link data. Machine learning is applied to this Domain Authority to combine it with information from thousands of actual search results to produce a score that accurately identifies the potential ranking strength of the site. A Domain Authority won’t necessarily stay the same, as the factors that are involved in the calculation may be constantly shifting. So, for example, if a site like Twitter suddenly acquired millions of new links this would have an impact on the Domain Authority score of every other site online – which would drop in comparison.

Why does Domain Authority change?

A Domain Authority score can go up and down at any time as result of the multiple factors that are involved in its calculation. Although it’s often difficult to identify the exact cause of a shift in Domain Authority score this may be happen because:

• The scale changes as the highest authority sites get more link growth (e.g. the Twitter example)
• Link profile growth for your website hasn’t yet been captured by the scoring link index
• Links are coming to your website from locations that don’t input into Google ranking
• Your Domain Authority is low and so tends to feel fluctuation in scale more acutely

Can you influence Domain Authority?

Because there are so many different factors involved in the calculation of Domain Authority it can be difficult to have any direct influence over this. It is, effectively, a metric for how successful a site will be in Google search results – as the calculation of those search results is based on a huge variety of different factors, so the Domain Authority metric is too. However, there are some steps that you can take if you want to positively influence it, including:

• Identify your competitors and make sure you’re comparing your site to the right ones – check site size, Domain Authority and content are similar
• Analyse links – the more followed links you have, the better. To get more followed links you’ll need to be posting high quality content that people will want to link
• Make sure your top pages are active and accessible
• Continue to build backlink profile – build more quality links from authoritative sites

Domain Authority can be a useful metric if you’re looking to improve SEO. If you’d like to find out more about your Domain Authority and how it could be helpful for your site, get in touch with the Digital Marketing Specialists at Iconic Digital on 020 7100 0726.