Understanding Higher Domain Authority & Domain Rating in Google Search Results
- Semil Shah
- December 6, 2021
Table of Contents
What is a Good Domain Authority?
A domain authority can be calculated as a point value of 1 to 100, with 100 being the most authoritative. If you want to find what the best domain authority is, you should calculate how many points the domain gets.
Several factors determine a website’s domain authority:
- A score of 40 to 50 is considered average.
- It is usually considered good to have a domain authority between 50 to 60.
- It is considered excellent when the Domain Authority score exceeds 60.
Additionally, the contexts of DA should be considered when evaluating it.
For a small business website to get something like 40 points in for a website authority score is quite promising.
Sites belonging to large organizations have different requirements, however.
When you invest more effort and time, the DA value will increase.
Below 60 is considered poor in this context.
Domain Authority and SEO: What's the Deal?
It takes consistency to track Domain Authority.
A burnt cake is the result of not regularly checking the oven.
The perpetual monitoring of websites is crucial. If your domain authority is not strictly monitored, your site may become less qualified than its competitors.
SEO requires constant monitoring and updating on a regular basis.
In order to maintain your ranking positions, you should constantly improve your website.
It is essential to monitor your Domain Authority in order to achieve higher rankings on search engine results pages while still attracting traffic.
Here are a few reasons why you should monitor this statistic!
An improved ranking
Google’s search engine results page (SERP) is the first place any company wants its website to appear.
In order to achieve this position, you will need to consistently and effectively work on SEO. DA is involved in these efforts by monitoring progress.
You are more likely to rank high on the SERPs if you have a higher score. It is important to keep in mind that other companies have similar goals.
To put it another way, you need more than good domain authority alone!
Several SEO rules must be followed to rank high, including utilizing keywords properly.
SEO is Perpetual
It is never too late to work on SEO.
In order to stay competitive on Google, your website must be constantly improved.
Answering the question “how to improve domain authority or what is a good domain authority” comes down to keeping domain power in check.
Your site needs to achieve good rankings and ranking as well.
Your company will become more relevant with the help of web optimization.
You can measure the quality of your SEO work by always keeping an eye on Domain Authority results.
Comparison based on good data
Measuring Domain Authority allows you to analyze your competitors, which is one of the main benefits.
Likewise, you can analyze companies that compete against you in the marketplace just as you can analyze your URL. Moz’s search engine allows you to enter a company’s link directly.
Comparing these two figures will help you gauge the marketing team’s workload and what is expected of them.
Do you know how to improve your domain authority?
Specifically, you must focus on optimizing certain points in order to achieve a high Domain Authority.
Your site’s DA rating is greatly affected by some major issues. This section will describe those issues and how they can be improved.
1. Make sure your website is responsive
The websites need to be accessible from any device, including mobile devices.
In order to benefit from a seamless mobile or tablet experience, a responsive website is necessary.
Google looks at responsiveness as a ranking factor. Your SEO will certainly be enhanced if your site is responsive to any screen size.
The DA score of a responsive site may also be high.
2. Use PageSpeed Insights to ensure a fast loading page
For sites with good Domain Authority, fast page loading is another key factor.
Monitoring this loading time should therefore be an ongoing process. Make sure that your page is fast using a tool like PageSpeed Insights.
Typically, it takes between 0.5 and 2 seconds. Then you should optimize your site if it exceeds this time frame.
How to Check Doma
Your Domain Authority score will become apparent once you learn about Domain Authority. There are a number of tools you can use to determine your domain score. Here are three tools that are useful for checking your website’s domain authority.
1. MozBar
Pricing: Moz Pro is free, and the premium is $99 minimum for all services. They have different packages according to your needs.
It’s no surprise that MozBar is so popular since Moz is the company that created Domain Authority. You can use MozBar to highlight how authoritative a website is.
You can use MozBar to find out how your website ranks and how it compares to your competitors.
You can see how your domain and page scores correlate with your search results ranking by looking at these scores. There are likely to be certain pages that do better than others.
You can incorporate this information into your content creation to make it align with previous content your audience enjoyed.
A machine learning algorithm is used by MozBar. Based on recent link activity, your domain score can be adjusted and recalculated. Using it gives you an overview of your DA constantly.
2. Ahrefs
Pricing: They offer 7 days of trial for $7 and monthly plans range from $99 to $999.
Domain Authority can also be checked with Ahrefs.
Ahres has changed the name of domain authority to domain rating, and page authority to rage rating, they mean the same thing.
In Ahrefs, you can find important information about your domain, such as websites that link to it and backlinks. You can also check if any of the links have a dofollow attribute, which is an important metric.
Ahrefs will show you everything you need to know about your website’s backlinks, SEO performance, and more.
Checking Domain Authority is easy with this tool.
3. Majestic
Pricing: The price for majestic ranges from $49 – $399 monthly.
Like the tools mentioned above, Majestic is also another handy tool you can use to check your website’s domain authority.
View the backlinks to your site with this tool and see how your site performs.
Its uniqueness comes from the fact that Majestic offers users two options for indices:
- You receive data about backlinks on a daily basis with the fresh option. Your company will always have the most updated domain score thanks to the continuous updating of this metric.
- Older data can be viewed by using the historical option. View the URLs that Majestic has indexed over the past five years.
In this way, marketers are able to see how their domain is performing and understand how it performs.
According to Majestic, inbound links should be high quality and plentiful. Knowing the quality and number of your links will help you determine where you need to make improvements.
Backlink trends can also be analyzed historically. With this tool, you can identify if any links have been lost. Also, you can try getting competitors to link to your website instead of their own if they have lost links due to 404 errors.
This allows you to improve your domain score by gaining those links back.
It provides an excellent way of taking action based on the score of your website using Majestic. Not only is Checking Domain Authority possible, but it also gives you actionable insights into improving it.
Why did my Domain Authority go Down
1. What is the reason for your DA changing?
To understand how DA changes, you’ll need to know how it is determined.
Multiple reasons can lead to DA changing:
- Moz has updated how it calculates the domain authority.
- The highest DA sites have a score of 100, since DA is a relative metric. As a result of noticeable link growth at any of the sites. This usually happens with Facebook and twitter, skewing the scales, which can negatively affect your DA.
- It’s inevitable that the number of backlinks you have will change over time, whether it’s for good or for bad.
2. How do I resolve the issue?
Investigate why the change has occurred. You can look in a few places to try to find them, but it’s not always possible.
Do you know if Moz upgraded? If the upgrade was the cause of your issue, check their “What’s New” page to try and understand how you were affected by the upgrade.
Once you’ve eliminated algorithm changes and noticed an increase in your DA, you should check the backlink profile. In case of growth, identify the sites that are performing well, identify the content they link to, as well as how users discover these sites. Can be social media, Google search results, etc.
Discover your strengths and focus on them, and use similar tactics.
In the event that your DA has dropped – not due to an algorithm change – take a second to examine your backlink profile again.
It may not have grown. Ideally, you should be increasing your backlinks as, in general, the amount of links on the web is increasing daily – therefore, on average, the DA indicator is consistently increasing, going upwards.
In other words, the presence of more backlinks implies that the threshold for “authority” continues to rise.
Be on the lookout for toxic links – links from malicious or ad-supported sites, spamming sites, networks of links that exist exclusively to build links, etc. An SEO tool like SEMrush can help you identify these links. As an alternative, your overall Spam Score should reflect toxic links if you’re using Moz tools.
In both cases, toxic links should be identified and disavowed through Google Support.
Other broken links on your website could also be harming your DA, such as incorrect page redirects and 404 errors.
How to Increase Domain Authority
Let’s look at how you can raise your domain authority now that we know just what it is and how it is determined.
To enhance your Domain Authority Score in the practical sense, you need to follow these steps.
- Improve Off-Page SEO
- Optimize your website for search engines
- Implement your technical SEO strategy
- Ensure Your Website Works on Mobile Devices
- Speed up your website – page Speed
- Extend your social network presence
- Take your time
Improve Off-Page SEO
You need to pay attention to your link profile above all other metrics. The DA score of a website with a good link profile is higher than a website with a poor link profile.
Strong link profiles: what are they?
Strong link profiles indicate that a website:
- Several high authority websites link to it
- Related websites provide incoming links
- Links that are of low quality are absent
- Several unique domains have been linked to it
What can you do to improve your link profile?
The off-page SEO process involves building a link profile and using techniques to obtain relevant links to enhance your ranking.
As part of improving your domain authority, among other things, you should strengthen your link profile by doing the following:
“Your profile should be free of bad links.”
Do away with bad links. To find toxic links, you use a tool such as Moz Explorer or Semrush.
The website owner can then be contacted to either devalue the link by removing the link or adding the “nofollow” tag.
It is possible to remove links from your profile by using the Google disavow tool if this fails.
You can strengthen your link building efforts by doing this
Link to other websites that are related. One of the most difficult parts of SEO is linking to related websites.
Beginners sometimes find link building difficult to understand and execute, because it is such a huge topic on its own.
A – Creating natural links
In order to attract links to your website from other websites, you need to have excellent content.
Creating natural links is a technique in which an individual discovers your website, checks out your content, and then includes a link in an article.
This works only if your website publishes high-quality content which is linkable.
Essentially, it should be informative, helpful, and easily understandable so that it may be referenced by other webmasters.
This method does work in reality, however, you will have to wait a few days for enough people to read your content for some to share it with others.
B – Networking with bloggers
Secondly, let other webmasters know that you exist and reach out to them.
In this way, it is more likely that you will link to them from your site.
Optimize your website for search engines
Next, work on your on-page SEO in order to increase the authority of your domain.
Page and content optimization is part of on-page SEO.
The topic of improving your on-page SEO is covered in detail in my SEO for Bloggers guide, but the key components are as follows:
Descriptions and titles optimized for search
Content optimization by using headings
Creating permalinks that are SEO-friendly.
Image and video optimization for search engines
Use natural, non-stuffing keywords as much as you can
Your content should have internal links
Optimize your content for more chances of showing up in Google’s featured snippets by formatting it as such.
Besides on-page SEO factors, off-page SEO factors take content quality into account, and the latter is the most important.
Implement your technical SEO strategy
Once you have your technical SEO in place, you don’t have to worry about it again once you get it right. Technical SEO involves tasks that are related to SEO on a lower level.
Alternatively, if you do not meet the technical SEO requirements for your site, the strength and ranking may suffer a great deal.
You need to review these critical SEO settings:
Become a Bing and Google Webmaster by signing up for each service
Sitemaps should be optimized and submitted to Google
Ensure that Google and other search engines can crawl your website without any problems by checking your robots.txt settings and using the Google Fetch feature to ensure your website can be crawled by search engines.
If your website is not already HTTPS, consider migrating
Search engines can better understand your content context if you include Schema information
Make sure that your breadcrumb menus are clearly defined on every page
When you have a website that has multiple languages, make sure to use hreflang.
Ensure Your Website Works on Mobile Devices
An optimized mobile-friendly website is now mandatory, not an option.
Among the reasons are:
Today, mobile searches outnumber desktop searches by about 60%.
Searches are typically started on mobile devices and continued on a desktop
Using mobile-friendly results in Google’s mobile search affects rankings
Google will begin including pages that are mobile-friendly in their mobile-first index
You’ll see a negative impact on the DA of your website if it doesn’t support mobile devices (or is not responsive).
If you have a mobile-friendly website, you can also add AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) functionality.
If you haven’t yet made your website mobile-friendly, you can start by using the Smartphone Friendly Test from Google.
You will receive a comprehensive report from Google to help you get ready for mobile.
Speed up your website – page Speed
It is known that Google uses page speed as one of its ranking signals. The faster a website loads, the higher the ranking.
In addition to improving online authority and rankings, it also enhances usability for users, and as a result, leads, sales, and sign-ups increase.
When it comes to page speed, it can be difficult to solve. There are many technical aspects that are concerning, which means you can run into a lot of difficulties.
But if you are unable to spare the money for developers to shorten the loading time, here are some suggestions:
Uninstall programs/plugins that are unnecessary
Improve WordPress and all its plugins by updating them
Please request an evaluation from your hosting company. Upgrade your hosting if necessary.
The size of images can be optimized
Videos can be viewed on streaming services
When working with massive CSS files and lots of images, consider using a CDN.
Extend your social network presence
While Google has claimed time and time again that social signals cannot be taken into account when ranking pages, it is evident that there are distinct differences between pages with high Google ranks and those with high social rankings.
Popular Google pages are often liked, shared, and tweeted.
The following steps will help you to increase your domain authority:
Try to increase your Facebook fans by working on your business page
In order to ensure that the content on your website gets some traction (likes, tweets, +1s, etc), make sure you have an engaged presence across several social networking sites.
To make it easy for readers to share your content on social media, including social sharing buttons
If you’re using the social sharing buttons to share your content, make sure it looks good
Take your time
Increases in domain authority cannot be achieved overnight, as mentioned in the introduction to this post.
You must be patient after making any of these changes if you want the crawlers on Moz to discover and evaluate your website.
As you improve your Google rankings, your domain authority.
Summing it up
Do you think we have missed anything important?
Using the tactics mentioned above, you can boost your website’s domain authority very easily.
About the Author
My name’s Semil Shah, and I pride myself on being the last digital marketer that you’ll ever need. Having worked internationally across agile and disruptive teams from San Fransico to London, I can help you take what you are doing in digital to a whole next level.