What is the Domain Authority?

Domain Authority is an important metric in the field of search engine optimization and was created by MOZ. The key figure describes the relevance of a page. Read more about the Domain Authority of MOZ.

Definition

The term Domain Authority (website authority) has evolved over time in SEO.

But be careful! This term should not be confused with link popularity or domain trust.

Domain authority or website authority indicates how trustworthy a website is on its topic. The authority of the page results from various factors. Search engines such as Google use crawlers to scan websites and calculate the authority of a website from elements such as domain trust, the quality of the text and the quality of the backlinks.

Since trustworthiness is the result of many different factors that are not based on hard, empirically determinable data, it is not a key performance indicator (KPI). In contrast to domain authority, link popularity refers to the number of links pointing to a website.

Why is Domain Authority so important?

In order to display the results of a search query, search engines like Google must rank web pages based on their relevance to the query. Based on this rating, the search algorithm determines the position of a website on the Search Enginge Result Page (SERP). Many factors go into this evaluation.

Technical factors include loading speed, clarity of URLs, their encryption or page architecture. In addition, text quality is weighted based on various metrics such as keyword distribution and much more. User behavior, how often they visit the page, how long they stay on it and the bounce rate, is also important. The quality of the content is important for user behavior on the site – but your users have to find your site first.

That’s why your Domain Authority is quite important for the position of your page on the SERP. Google calculates your Domain Authority from the user numbers, the user behavior, the number and the quality of your built backlinks. The age of your domain also plays a role in this calculation. The older your site is and the longer your site has enjoyed high domain authority, the better.

Backlinks – OffPage influencing factors

As described, the number and quality of your backlinks is very important for the trustworthiness of your site. Backlinks on other trusted sites are considered by Google as a sign that your site is trustworthy and provides valuable information to your target audience.

• A major factor is whether you have many links of your domain compared to other similar websites.
• It is also important whether the backlinks have been created over a longer period of time (organic build-up) or, for example, whether they have been created by the user. all originated at the same time or they even all have the same origin. These can be signs of spam and give a dubious impression. (see also Black Hat SEO).
• Since Google in particular has been placing more emphasis on good content on websites for some time now, it is reasonable to assume that websites with graphics, videos ,social media interactions or reviews on certain pages will be attributed a higher Domain Authority.

As soon as you get backlinks from untrustworthy sources – the so-called Bad Neighbourhood – your Domain Authority drops. That’s why Google quickly considers backlinks from pages without thematic reference to yours, or if many backlinks are set by the same webmaster, as spam and lowers your Domain Authority. At worst, Google may remove your page from the search results. No one wants to be missing from the SERP of the world’s most important search engine!

OnPage influencing factors

You can influence and improve the Domain Authority of your website with certain factors. These can be divided into on-page and off-page factors.

But be careful here! These factors are only discussed based on experience and self-tests but are not ranking factors confirmed by Google.

• The keywords that are stored in the title of the URL. In principle, this means: better keywords, better domain authority.
• In this context, the amount of keywords and URLs also play an important role.
• Equally important is the quality of the keywords in the headlines of your website.
• Very important is also the internal linking and the architecture of the page.
• 
  Alt texts
  are also included in the Domain Authority. This is a short description of an image in HTML code. The alt text is also used to describe to a user what is shown on the image if it cannot be displayed properly.

Conclusion

With Domain Authority, Google tries to evaluate how trustworthy and informative a website is for a topic. Many different factors go into this evaluation. For this reason, you need to have your search engine optimization factors in mind. Since your presence on the web is essential along with the browsing behavior of your users, you need to keep a constant eye on your backlinks and make sure that your site never slips into a Bad Neighborhood.