What is Domain Authority?

Have you heard of Domain Authority? If you don’t know what it is or if it applies to you, this post should help.

Domain Authority (DA) is a website metric which was developed by Moz. It takes many different measurements into consideration and changes regularly.

DA has to do with how a website might perform in a Google search. Some of what is considered in the DA ranking is domain age (how long the domain has been around), domain size (how big the domain is aka how many pages it has) and link authority (how many good quality links there are to the website.)

For many bloggers, their DA score won’t matter but those working with brands may find that they are occasionally asked for it. Bloggers and website owners who place a lot of importance on search engine rankings will also want to take note. It’s good to know your DA and PA scores and if they are on the low end, see what you can do to possibly improve them, but it’s not a metric you need to spend hours on or freak out about if it’s not as high as you’d like.

DA is a score out of 100 and the higher your score, the harder it is to move higher. Generally if a brand does ask for your DA/PA they are looking for over 30/35 DA and over 40/45 PA.

A higher score means the domain has a higher chance of ranking in Google Search for whatever terms they are trying to rank for.

Domain Authority vs Page Authority

Domain Authority measures the possible ranking of an entire domain. Page Authority measures an individual page. While your blog will only have one DA score, it will have a separate PA score for each blog post and page you have. When you first publish a post it will have a very low score and it will get better as more sites link to that post.

Can I Increase my Domain Authority?

There isn’t much you can do to increase your domain authority other than improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in general and do your best to get good quality links to your blog from other good quality blogs (the honest way.) Remember to include internal links as well (links to other relevant posts on your own blog.) Also remember that SEO means nothing if you don’t have lots of good quality, unique, evergreen content on your blog so if your blog has been mostly photos, memes, quizzes, giveaways etc, you might want to consider unique, evergreen content.

If you don’t have your own domain yet, get one as soon as possible if Domain Authority might be important to you. Domain age also has a factor in your DA so the older your domain, the better.

What is my Domain Authority?

You can check your DA and PA score at Open Site Explorer. If you have more than one site, you might want to use Small SEO Tools as you can check up to 10 sites at at time. Please note that DA is only accurate if you own your own domain.