Fahim Ahmed
Increasing your Domain Authority can be the toughest part of blogging. While every blogger is busy creating content they often forget to look into the most important metrics.
What is Domain Authority
Domain Authority or DA is a metric that defines the authority of your overall website. If you are looking to rank your website on the first SERP you need to make sure your website has enough domain authority. The higher your domain authority, the more chances you have to rank for a post.
Although Google never confirmed it, most SEOs believe that domain authority is a very important ranking factor.
The Domain Authority (DA) is a metric developed by Moz. It predicts how likely your website is to rank on search engines compared to other websites. The more authoritative your website is, the more likely it is to show up on the first SERP.
One of the most important metrics Moz uses to determine the DA of a website is the number of backlinks pointing to that domain. Backlinks are a way to measure the credibility of a website.
Other site explorers have also similar metrics like Moz to predict the credibility of a website. Ahrefs has its own ‘Domain Rating’ calculation method and SEMrush has ‘Authority Score’ to measure the credibility of a website.
Why Increasing Domain Authority is Important
Suppose you just created a new website. You are writing a lot of good content. But unfortunately writing good articles is not good enough to rank on Google SERP. It is because your site is brand new.
Most of the websites go through a filtering process before it starts to rank on Google. It usually takes 6-9 months to pass the ‘Google Sandbox’. Sometimes it even takes more time to see an increase in traffic.
Domain Authority usually predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. Being on page 1 of Google SERP is a dream for most publishers. But when you rank 1st for a keyword you can see up to a 200% increase in search traffic.
Websites on the top of search results usually have high domain authority. There are a lot of factors involved in ranking your post to the top of the search results. Apart from on-page SEO and quality content you also need high authority backlinks.
If you have a low domain authority it can cost you a lot of organic traffic which is very important.
How Long Does It Take To Increase Website DA
Increasing Domain Authority (DA) is not an easy task for any blogger. It takes a long time to increase the credibility of a site on the internet.
People have a lot of trouble improving their DA as it might take a long time to see visible change. It is impossible to skyrocket your domain authority.
Domain authority will automatically increase once you keep posting good unique content. As more people will link to those contents your DA will increase over time. Also, it is much easier for older domains to increase DA.
When it comes to increasing your site DA there is no time frame. It usually takes 6-9 months to see a visible change. For some people, it might even take much longer if they don’t know anything about off-page SEO.
You will see gradual changes in your Domain Authority once you start building backlinks.
But sometimes with the right strategy, you can fast track the process to increase your domain authority quickly.
Domain Authority or DA is measured on a scale of 1 to 100. The more Domain Authority a website has the more chances it has of getting organic traffic.
Most online news publishers tend to have high domain authority. It is because they produce a lot of good articles that people usually link to.
Online news portals get tons of backlinks and many high authority backlinks. High authority backlinks are do-follow backlinks from websites with high Domain Authority.
How To Check Domain Authority
There are several domain authority lookup tools out there. You can use any of these tools to check your website’s authority. Although Moz came up with the Domain Authority tool, Ahrefs provides a much precise calculation of Domain Authority.
Domain Authority is just a way to predict how well your website performs on the search engines. It actually does not influence any of the ranking factors used by Google to improve your website ranking.
Most of these Domain Authority checkup tools use a similar algorithm to understand the Google ranking process by taking all the variables and factors involved in ranking websites into account.
Domain Authority tools are just used for comparison purposes only. It gives you an insight into which website is performing better.
Checking your Domain Authority is very easy. If you are using Moz to check your Domain authority you can use their Free Domain Authority checker tools.
Just enter your domain URL into the search box and click analyze domain.
You will then see your Domain Authority score, the number of linking root domains, and also how many keywords your website is ranking for.
We suggest you use Ahrefs website authority checker to find a much accurate result for your domain. Here you can see the number of backlinks pointed to your website.
You can also create a free account on SEMrush to check your Domain overview. It will show you the authority score, organic search traffic, and the number of backlinks. It gives you a much detailed result for the number of keywords you are ranking for country-wise.
Also, you will be able to see the keyword trends and website traffic trends.
How Is Domain Authority Calculated
There are a lot of factors involved in calculating Domain Authority. Most site explorers take signals that directly affects ranking factors into account. According to Moz, they look into the most important (40 signals) to calculate the Domain Authority.
All of these signals are very important in ranking a website. Although it might not be similar to Google’s algorithm, so it is not accurate as the data Google has about your website.
Most site explorer uses important data that includes:
- The number of backlinks pointing to a website
- The type of backlinks a website has (text link, image link, form link, or frame link)
- Number of referring domains
- Relevancy of anchor text
- Number of Follow and No-follow backlinks
- Quality of your website content
- Social signals (how many social shares a website has)
- Number of Internal linking pages
- Number of Keywords your website is ranking for
- Overall website structure
- Spam index
The Domain Authority of a website keeps changing frequently. It depends on the performance of your website and content. DA is a very important part of SEO but it does not evaluate the overall SEO and ranking.
It is not easy to change your DA overnight. It takes time and a lot of effort to increase your domain authority. But some people might see drastic changes in their DA if they use some black hat technique.
Yes, your domain authority will increase by blackhat SEO tricks but it will just hurt your SEO and get your site penalized. Once your website is blacklisted by Google you won’t be able to rank no matter what you do.
It is very important that you try to increase your domain authority naturally.
Do not try to engage in any sort of link building scheme. It will take time to increase your website authority naturally, but it will be worth it.
However, there are ways you can improve your domain authority. If you follow this process you can see changes in your DA much faster.
It will help you increase your DA by at least 10 points over a period of 4 months. Remember Domain authority increases on a logarithmic scale. So this will only work if your domain authority is low.
It is very difficult to increase domain authority by 10 points once your DA is over 60. But if you have a DA over 20 you can take these actions listed below to improve and increase your DA.
5 Simple Steps On How To Improve Domain Authority
There are several actionable steps you can take if you are looking to increase your domain authority. Most of them are pretty easy and will take very little time to implement.
1. Look Into Your Backlink Profile
If you have been a part of the blogosphere you probably already know that Google loves a good backlink profile. Backlinks are the most important ranking factor in off-page SEO.
If you have tons of top-notch unique content but zero backlinks you probably won’t be able to rank on the 1st SERP of Google. For ranking on the top 20 of Google SERP, you need quality content and also backlinks from high authority websites.
Not only backlinks will help you rank on top of Google, but it will also increase your domain score. Backlinks are a trust signal which allows Google to understand better content. People usually link to contents that are of high quality and unique.
Google always prefers link profiles that have a lot of variation. Especially, links from trustworthy sites carry a lot more value than links from a low authoritative website.
If your website has a spammy backlink profile there is a very high chance of getting penalized. Once your site is blacklisted on Google, it is nearly impossible to rank on Google SERP. So make sure you avoid such a link scheme and maintain a good backlink profile.
Google keeps updating its SERP algorithm. So it is important you follow all the guidelines and stay away from any blackhat SEO strategies. It is very easy for Google algorithm to find out if a website is involved in a link scheme or blackhat SEO method.
Make sure you continuously do a link audit to see what kind of backlinks you are getting. Your site credibility increases when you have a variety of text links, image links, frame links, and form links.
Also, websites with .edu or .gov URLs are much authoritative. While many SEOs disagree and Google never announced this but .edu and .gov carry more weight than any other gTLD.
If you have found spammy backlinks pointing to your website, you should disavow it asap.
What is a good Backlink profile?
A website is said to have a strong link profile when:
- Your website has backlinks from authority websites
- Your post has do-follow backlinks
- Most links are from related websites
- The site doesn’t have spammy links (low-quality links)
- Your site has links from a number of unique domains
- The website has a variety of backlinks
- Links from unique referring IP
How To Get High Quality Backlinks
Getting backlinks from other websites is not an easy task. You need a lot of effort to acquire backlinks from high-authority websites.
One of the best ways of getting more backlinks pointing to your site is by creating unique and insightful content. When you have good articles or content on your website people are much more likely to link to it. Create contents that provide value and are resourceful.
Make sure to use high-quality images in your articles. Images are another easy link building tactics that most SEOs follow.
Email outreach is another method of getting high-quality backlinks. You can analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles and reach out to people who are linking to your competitors’ websites.
Doing this will eventually increase your SERP ranking as well as your domain authority.
Remove Spammy Backlinks
Getting rid of bad or broken backlinks is also very important for SEO. Spammy links can hurt your overall SEO and often get your site blacklisted. It is important to remove those spammy backlinks from your link profile.
Sometimes spammer and hackers try to devalue a website by spamming it with thousands of bad backlinks. It can cause your website to redirect to other pages or break down. All of these spammy backlinks are from sites that are already blacklisted by Google.
Spammers use some blackhat SEO tools to create thousand of false articles and link them to a specific website that they target. These links often contain gibberish anchor text and are a part of the blackhat link scheme.
These types of spam attacks can hurt your overall SEO overnight. So it is better if you use an SEO tool to identify those spammy backlinks.
You can then contact that website to remove the links pointing to your site. Furthermore, you can disavow those bad links from your profile by using the Google disavow tool.
You can also remove those backlinks using Ahrefs site explorer.
2. Optimize your On-page SEO
On-page SEO is very important in improving your search ranking and Domain Authority. It is as crucial as off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is much easier than off-page SEO.
All you have to do is optimize your site content. There are a lot of things you can do to improve your on-page SEO. This will improve your search engine ranking and also increase your DR.
