What Is My Websites Domain Authority?

Do you believe Domain Authority is a ranking factor that helps websites rank in search engines such as Google? Find out what the evidence says.

Pop quiz: SEO professionals are obsessed with a ranking metric that can help them grade a website’s quality, determine how difficult it is to rank on search engines, and tell how valuable a link they have from other sites.

Why Is DA Considered A Ranking Factor By Some?

Domain Authority is a metric. It’s a score that can range from 0-100. Domain Authority has been confused with Google’s PageRank, specifically the retired Toolbar PageRank. Sometimes, DA was mistakenly called a “Google metric.” Some SEO gurus referred to DA as the key to Google’s algorithm. It promised to increase your rankings and open the doors to search engines ranking your site.

Domain Authority vs. Domain Authority

Before we continue, let’s make an important distinction. There are two types of “Domain Authority”. We have already discussed Domain Authority (or DA). There’s also the notion of domain authority. The idea behind this is that Google gives greater authority to certain domains. You can also build authority over time for domains by publishing great content and attracting quality links.

This gives sites an inherent ranking advantage on the SERPs. It would explain, in simple terms, why a website such as The New York Times can rank in Position 1, whereas Joe’s News Blog launched last month would struggle. This idea is explored in more detail in our chapter Website Quality Score. Claim: Domain Authority as a Ranking Factor.

What Is Domain Authority?

Google created the Domain Authority (DA) search engine ranking score that predicts how likely a website will rank on the search engine result page (SERPs). Domain Authority scores can range from 1 to 100. Higher scores indicate greater ranking chances.

Domain Authority is calculated using data from the Link. It uses many factors to calculate. Domain Authority uses a machine-learning model to predictably find the ‘best-fit algorithm’ that best correlates our link data to rankings across thousands upon thousands of search results. This is what we use to scale against.

This post was written by Kristian D’An. Kristian is the owner and SEO Specialist at Lux Digital Marketing, for SEO in Tampa contact us today. Kristian has been optimizing websites successfully for over 7 years. He has helped his clients achieve the #1 position on Google in several different industries.