What is domain authority?
Domain authority (DA) is a metric used in SEO to measure the power (or strength) of a web domain or website. It’s calculated using an algorithm that takes into account the total number of external links pointing towards the website and indicates the probability of that website appearing in search engine rankings. This probability is the domain authority score.
What does a domain authority score measure, and why is DA important?
A domain authority score measures the strength of your domain name using a number between 1 and 100; the higher the score, the better. This score is calculated by assessing the website’s age, links, social shares, and other factors built into the algorithm. The higher your domain authority score, the more likely you are to rank high in search engine results pages when people look for your website’s keywords.
To clarify, the domain authority score definition is not the same as the Google algorithm (aka PageRank) which influences your website ranking. PageRank is a tool used by Google that assesses a site based on page links and the authority of those links, but is not as comprehensive as the domain authority score.
How is your domain authority calculated?
Each domain authority checker might be slightly different in how they calculate your site’s score, however, the main factors used to calculate your domain authority are:
- The number of incoming links pointing to your website
- The quality and relevancy of incoming links
- The quality of your website’s content
- Social signals (the sharability and popularity of your content across social media networks)
- Your website’s SEO performance in general
How do you increase your domain authority score?
There are many things you can do to improve your website’s domain authority, such as:
- Increase your social signals
- Improve your page speed
- Have a mobile-first responsive site
- Work on your technical SEO
- On-page SEO optimisation
- Work on your off-page SEO
To help you increase your site rank in Google and improve your website’s domain authority, we will be diving into each of the above tips in-depth over the next series of blogs. Make sure you don’t miss a thing by signing up to our community to receive these blogs in your inbox as soon as they are released.