Domain Authority is a metric used to measure the relative strength of a website generally measured in terms of the strength of backlinks in comparison with their competitor website at a given index in the search result. Domain Authority is a term coined by Moz, while a similar metric is termed by Ahref as Domain Rating. A few other SEO tools refer to this metric as Website Authority. At the base level, all measure the same result.
Why do we need Domain Authority?
Having understood what DA or DR stands for, it is time to understand how it impacts the ranking of a website in search results. Researchers have observed a direct correlation between website ranking and its authority, with a direct effect of website authority on the number of keywords the website ranks against. Since the main goal of every website owner is to make it to the top of search results (here we refer to Google SERP) it becomes extremely important to stay vigilant on DA. Having said that it is not recommended to create content and optimize focusing on DA alone. DA is simply the outcome of good quality content and the right level of optimization.
Factors Affecting Domain Authority
As already discussed the domain authority depends on the strength of backlinks, what it actually means is that the DA depends on following
Unique Domains
The higher the number of unique domains acts as a parameter in increasing the domain authority of the website. The number of backlinks from the same domain has a lesser impact on the authority when compared to the number of backlinks from unique domains.
Authority of Linking Domains
It is an understood fact that the domain authority increases when the linking domains also have high authority. Having said that it is not just the authority score of the backlink domain, but the relevancy and quality of the linking domain also matter.
Do-Follow vs No Follow Links
The increase in the backlinks with the "Do-Follow" status has an impact on your website authority, whereas links with the status "No Follow", "UGC" and sponsored links have a lower impact almost close to NIL.
Things to be aware of
If the linking website DR is gradually increasing over time but your website backlink count is consistent even then your DR will increase.
Backlinks from websites with a high DR and a large number of backlinks may not lead to an overall increase in your website authority. The reason is since the number of external sites linked to that referring domain is large enough, with at least one link having a do-follow status any additional external links to this site will not affect its DR as much, also having a backlink from this site will also not have much impact on your website DR as well.
This also does not mean a site with lower DR linking to a high authoritative website has lesser value when compared to sites with higher DR linking to low DR sites.
DR works on a logarithmic scale, and hence a backlink from a high authoritative site will have a smaller impact on your website DR when compared to a medium DR backlink, similarly backlink from least DR sites will also not affect your website authority, instead may cause lowering your website DR.
It is always advisable to link to high authoritative and high-quality websites.
Website ranking does not solely depend on website authority, instead, it depends on the page you are trying to rank higher which again depends on URL authority and domain level traffic.
It is observed DR has a direct correlation with the number of keywords and keywords play an important role in ranking a page in search results.
After learning these facts about domain authority, it is relevant that not all pages need high DR to rank higher on google search results or any other for that matter. It entirely depends on the keyword you want to rank for, there may be keywords that may need a backlink to a high authority website while there may be others that may not need backlinks at all to rank higher on google. Anyways, it is always an added advantage to get high-quality backlinks from high-authority websites. It helps increase the overall score and will in turn result in a higher ranking for your website.
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