Domain Authority is a rating/score on a scale of 1-100 developed by Moz that predicts how well a site will rank on search engines. The higher the DA of a site, the higher it’s ranking is likely to be. It’s based on a logarithmic scale, meaning that the difference between 40-50 DA is much greater than the difference between 20-30 DA.
While it is only a guideline score, it is something that brands tend to take into consideration when working with bloggers so it’s important to understand how it works. It’s also important to know that Domain Authority is worth measuring against other bloggers or “competitive” sites rather than as a score on it’s own or against your SEO efforts. It builds up very slowly over many years, so don’t feel hard done by if your score isn’t growing. Not even Moz itself have 100/100 DA Score. A DA of 30+ will start showing some authority in search engines.
It’s also worth noting again that DA is a guideline score by Moz. Google claim that there is no such thing as an “overall Domain Authority” in their ranking algorithm. Google do however still uses PageRank but no longer share each sites score anymore.
How is Domain Authority calculated?
Domain Authority is a measure of the power of a domain, it’s one of many factors that controls when your site ranks in search engines. A lot of factors also go into your Domain Authority score – such as how long you’ve had the domain, popularity of your site and the size.
1. Age
The age of the domain is an indicator of trust, it proves to search engines that the site has longevity. If the site owner has maintained registration of a domain consistently, generated an increase in traffic to that domain over time, and gradually grown then the search engines conclude that it must serve a purpose and be a trusted source, and not a spam site.
2. Popularity
This is measured a couple of different ways. One being the number of inbound links from other quality sites that your domain has. If you have a lot of inbound links (links to your site from other sources) then it’s a signal that your site has useful information that is worth sharing. This is why black hat SEO link building don’t work long time. Creating great content, sharing great content, networking and social media can all help build those links and generate traffic over time.
3. Size
The size of a size contributes towards it’s authority, the number of pages that exist correlate with the amount of content that can be linked to. A larger site with more quality content will naturally have more links than a smaller site with less content.
4. Other
It’s also based on other factors such as Moz Rank, Moz Trust, social signals, total backlinks, quality of backlinks, user experience, site loading time, traffic, and much more. All of these factors have an impact on the score. Due to this, it’s difficult to influence directly.
I’ll talk more about what you can do to help improve your score in a future post.
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How to check your DA Score
The easiest way is to use Moz Open Site Explorer. Type in your URL and click search. Remember that it only works on root domains, not if you use .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com which are subdomains. Once the page loads you’ll see a score out of 100 for Domain Authority.
How to improve your DA score
Check out Domain Authority Part 2 to learn how to improve your DA score and what to do if the number decreases after an update.
How do I check for updates?
For all the latest news about the updates, check out Moz Updates. It will tell you the date of the next update.
2 responses to “What you need to know about domain authority and how to check DA Score”
Okay well… my site is 25/100…not sure how I feel about this!
I can’t really say as so many factors come into it, like if your domain is relatively new then it’s would be considered a good score. As mentioned the number on it’s own doesn’t mean much, it really needs to be compared to competitive sites – so similar blogs that are in the same kind of niche as yours. Then you’ll have a better understanding of how well your DA is. Different brands look for different ranges of DA scores, so that’s also worth considering.