What is Domain Authority and How Can I Increase It?

Let’s walk through what DA or DR means, and how we can increase them!

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority is a metric that was created by Moz to predict how likely a website is to rank for a keyword on a search engine like Google. Domain authority or DA essentially identifies how competitive a particular website is by ranking all websites on a 1 to 100 scale.  

The score consists of a variety of factors but the most notable is the number of linking root domains and the total number of backlinks directed at the website.

What is Domain Rating?

Domain rating is a metric that was created by Ahrefs to assess the strength of a website’s backlink profile. Domain rating, or DR, is measured on a scale of 0 to 100.

What is the Difference Between Domain Authority and Domain Rating?

To be honest with you, not much at all. They essentially provide us with similar information, but they were created by two different companies. Moz and Ahrefs are two of the most prominent tools in the SEO industry and these metrics are used interchangeably.

How to Increase Domain Authority?

Increasing Domain Authority requires the website to increase the number of linking domains and the total number of backlinks. The more domains and total links directed at the website from quality websites, the more likely your domain authority will increase.

How to Increase Domain Rating?

The same goes for increasing domain ratings. To increase domain rating, you must increase the number of links pointed at your website.

Things to Consider for Domain Rating:

• The first backlink from a site will improve DR, subsequent links will not.
• A website linking via a “nofollow” link will not improve Domain Rating.
• If the linking websites DR increases, that positively affects the sites they are linking to.

What is Link Building?

An actionable step to influence your domain rating or domain authority is to link build. Link building is the process of building links to a website. For example, when a news source links to your website, this is called a “backlink”.

Why is Link Building Important?

As explained above, every website on the internet is given a Domain Rating” or Domain Authority. The higher your domain rating, the more competitive you become from keyword ranking. If your domain rating is higher than your competitors, and you follow SEO best practices, you will increase the likelihood that your website will rank highly for your targeted keywords.

How Do We Go About Link Building?

To build backlinks to our website, we will utilize a strategy called “Guest Posting.” Guest posting is the process of reaching out to websites, pitching blog topics, then writing and contributing a free guest post on their website in exchange for a link back to our website.

Link Building Best Practices

Domain Rating of Link Building Opportunity

We want to engage in opportunities with websites with higher domain ratings. The website does not necessarily need to have a higher domain rating than our own, however, we should not build links from brand new or very low domain rating websites.

Relevancy of Link Building Opportunity

We also want to engage in opportunities with relevant websites. If we are a clothing store but we are building links from a gaming news website, this is not going to do us any good. We want to build links from websites with a high domain rating but also relevant to the theme of our website.

Dofollow Links

There are 2 types of links, nofollow, and dofollow. For link building purposes, we are interested in building dofollow links, as this type of link passes the domain rating link juice on to the website it is linking to.

No Paid Posts

We want to avoid paying for guest posts as we want the guest post to be as organic as possible. Also, Google is 100% against buying links.

To Sum It All Up

Your domain authority is a reflection of your backlink profile. So, if you want to influence your domain authority or domain rating, you’ll need to start link building. While some brands may be able to generate press and build these links organically, some will need to utilize guest posting to build their backlink profile.

Need help building links to your website, or would you like to speak with an SEO specialist? Reach out for a free consultation!