What is domain authority – Simple Beginners Guide?
If you are new to blogging world then you should get familiar with the term Domain Authority, In short Domain Authority is also known as DA. Even though professional bloggers are totally aware of the importance of the domain authority some of those who are new to this world of blogging gets a bit confused or scared of the term.
Domain Authority is a word which holds a great importance in the world of SEO. The Domain authority will decide that how your content will rank on search engines, earlier the ranking factor of the website was dependent on page rank. Page rank was given to a website by Google but after the death of page rank, the function done by page rank is taken by Domain Authority. In order to rank higher you have to understand the basics of domain authority. So what is this Domain Authority.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain authority is a measure created by MOZ for ranking of a website reliability in search engine ranking. Domain authority is a metric which is measured in from 1 – 100 in which 100 is most authoritative where as 1 is the least. With the 100 points of measurement websites can be scrutinized even more for better rankings at the search engines. Even though Domain Authority is used for SEO but you can use it as a competitive measure for comparison with other websites.
To calculate Domain Authority Moz uses various signals like link counts, number of domains linking to website, MozTrust, MozRank, and many more factors. These factors are measured and blended together to make the Domain authority of a website. You can see that the websites with more domain authority have more trust factor so the content of these websites tends to rank higher.
Domain authority grows with the consistency and domain age, with age and consistent delivery of great content will increase the trust factor of your website which results in more people linking to your content and with domain age you will able to show that you are serious about the working of your website.
How to check Domain Authority?
To check the domain authority of a website you can go to open site explorer, which is the official link of Moz website to check the domain authority, even though there are some more options available online to check the domain authority which you can use, but open site explorer is the official way to analyze the domain authority.
If you are using chrome or firefox as the browser to surf the website then you can use a mozbar extension to install toolbar on your browser, this will help you to know the Domain Authority without the need of entering the website name manually. This toolbar will help you know domain authority, page authority and let you have access to many more features easily.
With these ways you can easily check the domain authority, with domain authority you should also check the page Authority. This page authority is same as Domain Authority but page authority is limited to authority of a specific page.With the amount of page authority you can take a guess that how important the specific page for the website.
Now that you know what is Domain Authority you should also know about two more terms which have a big hand in determining the Domain Authority of a website are Moz Rank and Moz Trust.
Moz Rank
Just like Google page rank Domain Authority uses moz rank to measure the rank of the incoming links, we simply call it backlinks. Moz Rank is measured from 0 – 10 just like Google page rank, with 0 is no rank and 10 being the highest among them.
Moz rank uses link authority to calculate the link juice flowing to the Domain, the average moz rank of a website 3 where as the more popular websites have a higher rank. The website have more Moz Rank have a greater domain authority which will result in better search engine ranking.
There are three Moz Rank factors
External Moz Rank
Moz rank uses link juice by analyzing the in bound links, in external Moz Rank only the links coming from external domains. If your content is good the people will like to link to your pages, this tells Moz Rank that your content is important and will increase the Moz rank, which in turn have an effect on Domain Authority.
Domain Level Mozrank
This also uses Moz rank but on the Domain Level, in this moz compare one domain importance with other. Moz uses an algorithm to analyze the importance of domain, Domain level moz rank is computed for both root domain and subdomains. This will help Moz rank by checking the domain Authority of the domains from which the link is coming from.
Moz Rank Passed
This is a way to analyze the power of links coming to a domain, This will take the note that how many more links are there on the page that is linking to your website. Number of links and domain authority of the page linking to your website helps moz rank to establish a rank.
Moz Trust
Moz trust also uses links to determine the trust flowing to your website. Moz have some trusted website which you can consider a source for trust, these websites are government websites (.gov), educational websites (.edu), or website with large number of content which is useful like Wikipedia.
Moz trust measures that how far you are from the trusted source. For example if a .gov site links to you directly then you have a major trust flowing to your website with a single link, and if the same .gov website links to a website named A and then this website named “A” links to your website then again trust will flow to your website but it will be less than the direct link, so if there are more websites in between then the trust factor keeps on getting decreased.
The power of trust flowing to your website also gets effected by the fact the link you are getting form is the home page or not. Home page is the most important page of the website, so if you are getting a link from a home page then the trust flowing from it will be greater.
Moz trust have an algorithm which takes note that from which page the link is places and how far the trusted source is.
Moz trust is also related from 0 – 10 where 0 being the least trust and 10 being most, its easy to have a trust of 3 – 4, when it comes to have a trust of 8 – 9 it is more difficult to have that.
Conclusion
Domain Authority is very important to make you rank higher, now when the page rank is dead domain authority is the factor that can get your posts to rank higher in Search engines. To increase your Domain Authority you should consider making some backlinks from domains having higher domain authority.
Now you should check your Domain Authority and take measures to increase it.
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