Domain Authority is a critical metric behind your website. It is a 0-100 scale where 0 is bad and 100 is the best. Each website is given a domain authority score, commonly abbreviated as DA. It is a scoring system that was developed by Moz and has since been adopted by most tools in the SEO industry.
The score of your website is generally comparable with the amount of traffic your website gets, but they are not connected. A high DA website, may not get that much traffic, but it is unlikely. Domain authority is generally a score based on a websites backlink profile. Websites that have a great backlink profile will often have a very high DA score to go along with it.
Is Page Rank and Domain Authority the Same thing?
Google once had a metric called page rank. It was a public score they gave to websites. The system was abused since people could mess with their site and see if it improved their page rank, if it did, they now knew an important piece of information about Google’s search algorithm. Google have removed this from the public eye, but they may still use it internally. Point is that it is no longer any use to us.
Domain authority was not developed by google and is not the same thing as page rank. The Moz domain authority is less about an algorithm of complicated ranking factors and more of a logarithmic scale that will go up or down based on your link building habits and the quality of your link profiles. The score is not the same as page rank and it is not a replacement for page rank either.
Is Domain Authority a Ranking Factor?
The short answer here is no, but the long answer is yes. When Google considers web pages to show in the search engine result pages, it will, as you know by now, consider many factors about that website. Those factors include many of the same things that contribute to your DA score too. A high DA score is a sign that your website is doing well and has a great backlink profile. Since backlinks are also a very significant ranking factor, your DA score is a sign that you have a good inbound link profile and this should impact search results.
Improving Your Domain Authority
The million dollar question right! It isn’t that complicated really. If you have already read over the guide to understanding backlinks, then you already have the answer to this. Improving your DA score can be done by getting more backlinks. As we all know, this is much easier said than done, but this is how it is done.