Domain Authority sounds so….authoritative and important, right?
Well, that’s because the people who created Domain Authority, a metric that describes how important a website is in relation to a specific keyword or phrase, wanted everyone to believe it is a make or break number that all companies must know and monitor.
Domain Authority (DA) was a score developed by Moz, a company that offers SEO tools.
Like all companies, Moz wants to grow their profits and increase their brand awareness. So they developed and branded the term domain authority.
And while Moz’s domain authority doesn’t ultimately factor into search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine results pages (SERP), there is some value to the concept.
Let us explain.
Table of Contents
The Definition of Domain Authority
Moz describes DA as, “Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking.
The number, according to Moz, is determined after Moz calculates dozens of attributes on a website, including:
- The number of internal and external links on your site
- The number of unique external sites that link to your website
- How “spammy” your site is
There are other factors too, but Moz doesn’t want to release them because that information is proprietary. We understand that impulse. We recently developed a proprietary program too. It’s called the Active Pixel Program, and it’s related to programmatic advertising. If we tell people too much about how it works, our competitors may steal our idea. (By the way, we’ll be writing a lot about it on our blog soon).
Moz is not the only search engine optimization service provider that has developed a tool for gauging how well a website ranks when it comes to certain keywords. They were just the first to do it. These other companies offer something similar:
- Ahrefs has an Ahrefs Rank (AR) and Domain Rating (DR). AR ranks websites in the Ahrefs database by the size and quality of their backlinks, while DR shows the quality of a website’s backlinks compared to others in the Ahrefs database on a 100-point scale.
- Semrush has an Authority Score that measures the overall quality and SEO friendliness of a website or specific webpage.
- Majestic has Flow Metric Scores that measure the number of links a website has and how well-written and well-structured a website’s content is.
We use Moz’s DA and Ahrefs the most when measuring our own website, and the authority of our clients’ websites.
That said, Google does not consider Moz’s DA or any other metric from other companies when they decide where to rank a website in SERP. Google doesn’t really care what Moz has to say about a website. Google has their own proprietary tools.
However, Moz’s DA can still help a company figure out what Google “might” think about a company’s website. It also gives you insight into how your site’s quality compares to the sites of your competitors.
What’s a Healthy Domain Authority Score?
We never particularly liked the SAT and ACT, those tests that students take to get into colleges. That said, we do like Moz’s Domain Authority score.
A site’s DA falls between 1 to 100. Just like elementary school tests, the closer your score is to 100 the better your site is, at least when it comes to figuring out where your site will rank in SERP for common keywords in your industry.
Remember when you’d get a bad grade in English class but you didn’t know why? Well, Moz does try to lay out their criteria for grading websites so people can understand where they need to improve.
One area they judge is the quality and quantity of backlinks, or who links to your site from their site, and how many sites link to your site. If a page has backlinks from pages with a high authority — such as a news website, Wikipedia, non- profits or the government — it will have a higher score.
You want to do what you can to get backlinks. But you have to be reasonable – you can’t force another website to link to yours. You can offer to exchange links, however, with complimentary businesses. A hair salon, for example, could reach out to a nearby massage center and offer to link to their website if they do the same. You can get listed on your local chamber of business website. And you can send out press releases about new product lines, events and more to journalists, in the hopes they publish a story about your business.
Be sure to check out the websites of your competitors. Where are they featured? Maybe those news organizations or businesses will want to link to you too.
How to Check Domain Authority
On Moz, you can check your website’s Domain Authority for free through Link Explorer. You just need to enter your domain’s root URL (like www.seodesignchicago.com) and your webpage’s Domain Authority score will appear automatically.
You do have to sign up, but you don’t have to enter a credit card (you will have to confirm an email sent to your inbox, however).
You’ll then see your DA score, as well as the number of external linking domains (the root domains of websites linking to you), the number of unique pages linking to a page (links from specific pages on the previous sites), and the total number of keywords for which your website is ranking within the top 50 positions on Google (Ranking Keywords).
This last one is huge. If you are not ranking for keywords you want, that’s when you want to reach out to a digital marketing company like us at SEO Design Chicago. For example, if you are a plumber, you want to be ranked for “plumbers near me.” If you’re not, we can get you listed in places that you need to be indexed in (like Google Map Packs), and create web pages (or revise existing web pages) so that they’re more SEO-friendly.
Revising or creating web pages so that they are SEO friendly means you take the following steps:
- Include relevant keywords in a page title, meta description, the body text and image alt tags
- Make sure the website loads fast enough to meet Google’s standards
- Make the website is mobile friendly
- Linking one page on your website to multiple pages on your website
And about 200 other factors? Don’t want to learn 200 new things? That’s why you can turn to us.
Does Google Care What Moz Thinks?
Many articles discussing Domain Authority refer to it as a search engine ranking score and suggest it is a good indication – if not the ultimate “authority” – of how well a website will perform in Google SERPs for keywords. So if you’re a yoga studio in Chicago, you may think the Moz DA is the ultimate truth teller of where your site ranks for “yoga studio Chicago.”
But it’s not.
Even Moz admits it. Google has blatantly said so.
Google executive John Mueller is renowned for revealing the most intimate secrets of Google’s SEO algorithm without revealing too much. He says that while Google sees value in Moz’s Domain Authority, the tech giant doesn’t use it to determine where they place sites in SERP.
In December of 2016, Mueller said point blank, “Google doesn’t use ‘domain authority’.”
Pretty clear, right?
It’s not outdated either. In 2018, a Reddit user asked Mueller in an “Ask Me Anything” if DA mattered to Google.
Muelle said, “Of course it exists, it’s a tool by Moz.”
Later that year, in case that caused confusion, he added in another Reddit AMA, “‘Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz’ so exists = yes. Search engines don’t use it.”
For some reason, no one wanted to believe him. So in 2020, Mueller received another question about domain authority. This time, someone asked if backlinks from high domain authority websites matter in website rankings. He again said, “We don’t use domain authority at all in our algorithms.”
Then in 2022, he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever looked up the DA for a site in the 14 years I’ve been doing this.”
So let’s get together, everyone. Google doesn’t care about DA when it comes to SERP. But that doesn’t mean companies shouldn’t use the best lessons from Moz’s DA to up their SEO strategy.
If your DA score is low, reach out to us for a free SEO audit of your site. From there, we’ll suggest ways to get your site ranked higher in SERP for the keywords that matter in your industry.
Contact Us Today!