Nice post Nick. One other common issue I find is that people forget that their DA is always relative to other sites. Site owners will often freak out when their DA drop by a few points without realising that this is often only an indication of how their site compares to DA 100 sites, not to their direct competitors. Reply
Thanks Danny. That’s actually a fantastic point that I should probably add into this post as it’s happened to me several times. Site owners use DA as their single top-level metric to measure success and when/if it goes down they panic and suddenly question the effectiveness of all of their SEO campaigns. Reply
I know you said you aren’t hating on DA, but I am, but with reason. If you were to compare the company size of Moz vs the likes of Majestic & Ahrefs, you’ll see a VERY big difference, in both funding, resources and staff.. This should all result in Moz’s ability to be able to out-scale both Majestic & Ahrefs when it comes to their index size – I realize Majestic are solely focused on links, but Ahrefs (which is relatively still new to the industry) has been pumping out new, exciting tools like there’s no tomorrow that are all data-backed from different sources. Moz has always been behind Majestic when it comes to links, both in quantities and (which is the most crucial part) freshness – They still to this day don’t seem to have a solid freshness update in place to show users new links within their old links.. It requires you to look at / export data from TWO tabs if you want to see the most up-to-date data, which is intrinsically annoying for any user to have to do. Step up your game Moz, or you’ll be left behind by the Europeans that are currently battering your user base with better data. Reply
I agree with the notion that from an investment perspective, paying specific attention to both technology and technical resources, that you would expect more from MOZ in terms of building an industry-leading index OR to your other point, at least doing one thing in the space really well. In that same vein though, it does seem like for a very long time they were plagued with some major technical debt that, at least from the sounds of it, really hampered their ability to keep up at scale and run efficiently enough to grow at the pace of their competitors – not to mention routine production issues, that just seem to continue to bother users. Reply
Totally agree, but they’re all company mistakes that could of been changed – I think the problem is, they wanted to do things so far into the future for what they had, they ended up just hurting their overall technology. Reply
I agree that DA isn’t the golden metric of SEO, but it is a good reference point. In my experience, DA is one of the best overall metrics of a site’s ability to rank compared to the other leading link explorers. With that being said, when i’m looking to get a more holistic view of links, i’d much rather use AHREFs or Majestic compared to Moz, simply becasue of the breadth of their indicies are so much larger. Reply
I completely agree that it’s a good reference point, and to the point I make in the post – I think it’s still very useful as a directional measure of trust and link authority. Based on the case study I liked to toward the middle of the post, I think the fact remains that you still need to use all of the “big 3” link indices in concert to get a relatively accurate view of any site’s link profile without access to Search Console. Reply
Excellent post, Nick and I’ve long been a proponent of focusing on *relevancy* over metrics like DA and PR (see this article here). Something tells me that Google didn’t phase out PR so that we should become immersed in DA. Just a hunch 🙂 Reply
Thanks David. I couldn’t agree more, in my mind *Trust* comes first, *Relevancy* is a close second. Your Leo meme in that post says it all 🙂 and re-enforces exactly what i”m hitting on in this post; DA as a measurement is useful for directional measurement – but there are literally 1,001 other elements that are more important to drive success and results. Reply
Great post. Good illustration about how the number of referring domains is more important than the number of links. I wonder though, although results #3 and #7 have a higher link diversity ratio, their respective number of RD of 19 and 20 are still a lot lower than the other results. It makes sense to be that high for #3 because it’s the manufacturer domain. But what about #7? Reply
They are very low, but if you’re going to draw inferences about this SERP, as low as the total number of LRD’s *is* for #7, I would also point out that the LDR (link diversity ratio) is exponentially higher.. and while there’s no hard and fast rules in SEO that always remain true, more times than not when there’s an outlier URL in a SERP the LRD tends to be a leading indicator. Reply
Good to see here nice topic on how important is Domain Authority in SEO Nowadays….thanks, Nick you have shared such a fantastic news looking more news in future Reply
This site certainly has all the information I needed concerning this subject and didn’t know who to ask. Reply
Hi, I am Linda, I own number of websites and I have hired people for SEO of all those sites, but Lately I myself learning something about technical stuff, which can help me handle my site son my own and latest i learned about Domain Authority and I have been working on it in past few months. But despite having good internal Linking and god content, Most of my sites Domain Authority is around 15-20 which I think is not good, as I love to attract more advertisers and without having Good Domain Authority, it is tough to attract high paying advertisers. So, what basically, I want to ask here, is there any way to increase Domain Authority quickly, I mean in 2-3 Months? ~ Linda Reply
Hey Linda – What are you doing to earn strong authority links from other websites? From just a quick look at your best steam irons website it’s clear you are putting time and effort into creating content, but the English is broken and there are numerous grammatical errors. This causes for problems for 2 immediate reasons; 1. Google is very good at parsing natural language, and it’s immedaitely identifiable that the English on your sites is not native, and could be taken as machine-driven or spun content. 2. In my experience webmasters and site owners are hesitant to link out to sites with spelling and grammar mistakes, so this could be directly impeding your ability to earn links. Reply
Nice article Nick. I rely on DA a bit too much when doing competition research. It’s probably the #1 metric I look at. I think it’s just easy to quickly look at DA to get a split second opinion of how authoritative a site is although there is A LOT more to consider than just that metric. Cheers. Reply
Indeed a great post about domain authority. Domain authority is the most popular website metric developed by Moz. It is said that If the Domain authority of any site is high then that site will perform better in search engines and will gain more traffic. Domain authority help us to determine to quality of a site. To improve domain authority, We must have to gain quality backlinks and should must have to maintain the content quality on our website. Having high DA helps a lot while ranking any content in SERPs. I am glad that you have covered detailed article on it. Thanks for sharing it with us. 😀 Reply
Thanks for the great post. Let’s say you need to analyse 1000 domains what’s the best way to do it when focussing on the relevancy of links pointing at those domains? I can only do this manually, which is a pain but hoping you have a better way of filtering it. Thanks Alex Reply
Great break down on DA, i been trying to increase DA to my website (Forever) the right way, i think; i have to many links that are no follow, so i’am not seeing a increase in DA, but thanks for some great knowledge, it was needed Reply
Your right about DA not being the right tool for looking at links. I’m currently using ahrefs and they blow them out the water. A huge increase in available data outperforming everyone. You can also check all new links found. See whether you are getting hit by some unscrupulous jealous fellow webmaster. Thanks for the post Nick Reply
Great article, I have increased my knowledge. But i’m not agree that DA or PA 100% working. It’s all game about Link Quality. I have seen my many competitors who have Just DA 10 and beating a DA50’s domain with High Quality Backlinks. Majestic, MOZ and ahrefs are software or bots who scrape sites and it’s all data. So i suggest that we need to think our self. Thanks Reply
Moz domain authority score is not authentic. Here is the proof: https://www.dearjulius.com/p/da.html Reply
I gathered Good Information on Domain Authority Today. Thank you for sharing this blog. According to the latest update on Moz, I have noticed that if you’re posting a new blog that PA by default is 1. It used to happen on web 2.0 but it happening in blogs as well. Reply