Domain Authority is the measure of how much google trusts your website. It is a reflection of how authoritative and trustworthy your site is.
The best way to increase Domain Authority, according to me, is by using content marketing strategies. Content marketing helps you in building brand awareness and trust among consumers.
Many people are struggling to increase their Domain Authority because they don’t know where to start. If you’re one of them, this article will help you understand what steps you need to take in order to increase your Domain Authority fast.
If you are a webmaster or website owner, of course, you are familiar with the “domain authority” word. On SERPs, a website does not simply rank because it has good content and links to it.
Google will take into account so many other factors when determining a website’s ranking.
Domain authority is one of these factors that play a vital role in ranking. Webmasters or website owners are too focused on growing their Domain Authority and try to grow it overnight.
But growing one’s Domain Authority takes a significant amount of time. It is a time-consuming task. If you think that a few changes to your site will boost its Domain Authority overnight, you are entirely wrong.
Table of Contents
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that was originally developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on Google search. The domain authority score ranges from 0 to 100.
You can check your website’s DA score by using the free domain SEO analysis tool by Moz.
What is a good domain authority score?
Domain Authority score between 40 and 50 is often considered good, between 50 and 60 is better and anything over 60 is considered excellent.
Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a web page or URL will rank in search results. The page authority score ranges from 0 to 100. Where higher the score, the greater the ability to rank.
Based on the data from the Moz backlink web index, it calculates Page Authority (PA) which includes backlinks, domain authority, and many other factors. It fluctuates when they update the algorithm that calculates Page Authority (PA). Just like Domain Authority (DA), the Page Authority score is calculated using a machine learning algorithm.
You can check your website’s PA score by using the link explorer tool by Moz.
1. Build Quality & Relevant Backlinks
Moz MOSTLY considers how many authoritative backlinks a domain (or website) has to determine its DA score.
High-quality backlinks are the most significant factor to increase the domain authority of a website. Not only quality links can determine your DA score but they’ll also help you with higher search rankings.
So how to get high-quality backlinks in 2022?
Here are a few PROVEN link building techniques you can use.
Publish guest posts
Guest blogging is an evergreen strategy in link building.
Guest blogging is the process of writing content for another website. They get FREE content and you get backlinks and traffic. So it’s a win/win approach.
But most people ignore guest blogging because it takes time and effort to find guest blogging sites. If you have a budget, hire someone to publish guest posts for you or do it on your own.
Here are a few simple strategies to follow in guest blogging:
- Try to land your guest posts on authoritative sites in your niche. Put your effort into writing amazing content for them. One backlink from an authority site can change the fate of a brand new blog.
- Use guest posts to grow your email list. In case you don’t get search traffic, your email list can help you generate traffic.
- Connect to the blog owner before you even pitch the topic. For this, comment on their blog posts, reply to their social media posts, and email regularly.
- Once you write for them, promote your guest post like your post.
- Write guest posts that are informative. Try case studies as they often work like a charm.
Run giveaways to build backlinks
We already mentioned backlinks are extremely important for SEO. Most bloggers don’t link to other blogs unless the content is really good.
So how can you easily find link building opportunities?
Run giveaways and contests. Yes, contests can be a great marketing strategy to build brand exposure, awareness, and backlinks.
Here are a few quick tips to run a contest to build backlinks in 2022;
- Giveaway something that everyone wants. You can consider something like a Macbook, an iPad, or an extremely popular tool in your industry (let’s say Semrush for 1 year).
- Ask your participants to write a quick blog post about your contest along with a backlink to your website. This is how you can generate more traffic and links.
- Make it easy for everyone to participate in your contests. For example, you can opt for entrants to submit a 100-word review about your giveaway instead of a 500-word article.
- Set a deadline for your contest. It’s a good idea to run your contest for at least 6 to 8 weeks so you’ll have enough time to promote it and persuade a good number of entrants to participate in your contest.
- To attract backlinks from high DA websites, give more points to the website owners who give a link back to your site.
Spy on your competitors
One of the best ways to build links is to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles. Find out how your competitors are building backlinks along with their sources.
You can easily spy on ANY website’s backlinks using a tool like Semrush.
Semrush offers a tool called Traffic Analytics that helps you easily discover all the top pages that are driving the most traffic to ANY domain.
2. Remove Toxic Backlinks
Google has various algorithms to punish websites with bad or toxic backlinks. This is usually done by Google to reward sites with high-quality backlinks.
Moz also considers the quality of your website’s backlinks so removing toxic links from your site can help with a higher DA score.
What are toxic backlinks?
Toxic backlinks are the links that come from spammy or low-quality websites. These backlinks could harm your website’s SEO.
Why remove toxic backlinks?
If Google notices that your blog has a fair number of toxic backlinks, then it punishes your website with poor rankings. It can also lead to a bad backlink profile which ultimately degrades your site’s DA.
If you notice a sudden drop in search traffic, you should first take a look at your website’s backlinks and get rid of toxic backlinks.
Here is how you can remove toxic backlinks:
- Use a site audit tool like Semrush to find and fix your bad backlinks
- Contact the site owners and request them to remove your links
- Use Google’s disavow tool to remove toxic backlinks
If you’re looking for a detailed guide, go through our guide on how to remove bad backlinks which is extremely helpful for beginners.
3. Create a White Hat SEO Strategy
If you want to build a solid backlink profile for your website, create a white hat SEO strategy.
White hat SEO refers to all the SEO strategies that function within the rules and guidelines of search engines such as Google.
Implementing a white hat SEO strategy is nothing but getting natural backlinks to your blog. If a high number of pages linked to your blog are relevant to your niche then Google loves to rank your site higher.
How to get natural backlinks?
Content is the king. Write remarkably great content that is not easy to find on other websites.
You can create insightful posts on controversial topics, in-depth case studies, interviews with experts, or statistics around your industry. You can also try the following methods to build white hat backlinks.
- Hang out on blogging forums, and events related to your niche and build connections with fellow bloggers. Try to help each other out by linking to each other’s best pages (or blog posts).
- Use sites like Quora. You can pick interesting questions that you can answer and link back to your site.
- Find blog commenting sites. Comment on informative posts by linking to your website.
- If possible, invest in developing a tool, software, or plugin and offer it away for free. If it’s really useful, it will attract a huge number of links.
- Check for broken links and replace your link provided you have a similar type of content.
- Write genuine guest posts to authoritative sites in your niche and include a link to your site.
- Republish the viral posts and link to the original source. There is a possibility that most of the blogs link back to your blog while citing them.
Always remember that quality backlinks help to get quality traffic and to get better rankings really quickly to any website no matter how old or new it is.
4. Increase the dwell time of your website
Increasing your website’s dwell time and reducing your site’s bounce rates can immensely help you increase your website’s domain authority really quickly.
What is dwell time?
Dwell time is an important On-Page SEO metric that calculates your website’s:
- User engagement
- Session duration (aka bounce rate) and
- Click through rates (of your search results)
The more people who spend time on your site reading a page (article, infographic, or video) the better rankings it will get.
Dwell time simply means how long your blog visitors are staying on your site without hitting the back button. Google is giving more importance to the sites with better dwell time so your domain authority also increases if you focus on improving your dwell time.
Here are a few powerful tips that you can use to increase the dwell time of your websites:
- Start creating 2000+ word blog posts
- Show related posts under every blog post
- Do interlinking regularly and do it wisely
- Open external links in new tabs
Now let’s talk about them in detail.
1. Start creating 2000+ word blog posts
Short content is dead long ago. If you want to compete with others then start creating 2000+ word blog posts. The long posts drive quality traffic and generate more leads. Google always favors detailed and long content.
If you want to get ranked in Google’s top 10 organic positions then your blog post should contain a minimum of 2000 words. Creating that long form of content takes time but it attracts backlinks and organic traffic.
Longer posts get more social media engagement.
Also, long content generates more backlinks than shorter posts.
- Find evergreen content ideas and dig through Google trends for trending topics. Write on “how-to” guides, and frequently asked questions in your niche.
- Gather data and perform scientific studies. Do extensive research before writing a long-form of content.
- Create a robust structure and outline your ideas.
- Once you have structured the ideas then start writing.
- Use the Pomodoro technique to avoid distractions while writing.
- While writing break long paragraphs into 2 to 3 sentences.
- Double-check grammar and spelling mistakes before publishing.
2. Show related posts under every post
To increase page views and reduce bounce rate, you need to see that users won’t leave your blog after reading the first post. So, what can you do?
Show related posts under every post. You can install a free plugin like Contextual Related Posts to show related posts under your blog posts.
The best way to keep your blog visitors for a long time on your blog is to show related posts at the end of each blog post. So start showing related posts and check the results for yourself.
3. Interlink to your old posts
Interlinking is nothing but linking to your old blog posts. To interlink, focus on targeting the right keywords. If you do it in the right way, you can drive massive traffic to your blog.
What interlinking can do?
- Gets more organic search traffic.
- It helps in ranking better for the desired keywords.
- It increases page views.
- The pages that are linked more often get high domain authority.
- It helps search engines to crawl each and every page.
4. Open external links in new tabs
Opening external links in new tabs can reduce website bounce rates.
If you are a WordPress user, you can use the open external links in a new window plugin.
And make sure to reduce your website’s bounce rates to increase your overall site’s domain authority. Bounce rate is also known as exit rate which is a factor that’s involved in your website’s user behavior.
If someone is leaving your website without clicking on any other page (i.e on their first visit itself), it’s considered a bounce rate. The lesser bounce rate or exit rate your site has the better it is for you to increase your SEO and hence your overall domain authority. So it’s a good idea to always open links in new tabs.
5. Be smart about external linking
Your external links and backlink profile play a VITAL role in improving your domain authority.
According to Moz, external links are the most important source of ranking power.
Have a look at the image below to understand how important backlinks are when it comes to boosting your domain authority.
Here’s another important thing to consider. If you’re giving away too many links to others from your site without actually acquiring new backlinks, it’s very hard to increase the domain authority of your sites. So be smart while linking out to other sites, references, or web pages.
As a rule of thumb, you can use rel=”nofollow” tag whenever you’re linking out to
- Plugins
- Tools
- Affiliate products
- Social media platforms
- Software
- Reviews etc
Russ Jones, Principal Search Scientist at Moz announced that they are introducing a new domain authority algorithm in the month of March 2019.
You can find more details about it here.
Moz developed the new domain authority score by looking at more relevant domain authority metrics which removes spam, improves correlations, and most importantly, updates Domain Authority relative to all the changes that Google makes.
You can check your own site along with your competitor site’s DA to see how relevant and effective the new DA change from Moz is.
Don’t fret about the new DA changes if your website’s DA rankings go down as it’s not a legitimate or accurate search metric that actually doesn’t determine your Google rankings.
Check And Recover from Google penalties
Every blogger wants to get more traffic to their blog and get ranked well in the top 10 search results.
A traffic drop could seriously impact most businesses. Google is known for frequent algorithm changes to give a better user experience.
So it’s important to keep an eye on Google updates and try to fix your site to improve your rankings (which can also help you with better DA).
How to identify Google Penalty?
Monitor your website rankings. If you don’t monitor, you will not be able to spot Google penalty. You can use the following tools;
- Google Analytics: It helps you to know your site’s overall health and you can track changes in organic traffic. This tool interacts with many other SEO tools that are available online. Apart from monitoring your website traffic, you can also check ranking status.
- Google Search Console: It is also a free tool and helps in monitoring your website traffic.
- Semrush: Extremely helpful to find and fix your website issues. You can read this guide to performing site audits with Semrush.
Also, you can use this helpful page from Moz to check for major Google updates.
How to recover from the Google penalty?
Low-quality backlinks penalize your site heavily. These can harm your site beyond repair.
In order to escape from such bad backlinks, avoid getting links from the
- Sites with duplicate content
- Sites that are not related to your niche
- Sites that have thin content
- Adult sites, casino sites, etc
95% of the Google penalties are related to the site’s backlinks only so identify backlinks that are causing a drop in your rankings.
One of the common questions most people ask is “what should I do if my site’s DA domain authority drops?.”
First things first: domain authority is just a metric, not a ranking factor. Although a good DA score indicates that a website has high-quality links but it doesn’t guarantee first-page rankings.
There are so many instances of sites going from a DA 50 to 30 or even below within a few months and there are also instances where a site with a less DA score gets #1 rankings on Google.
So what can you learn from it?
DA has nothing to do with your search rankings. DA is a search metric developed by Moz (not Google!).
Instead of worrying about why your site DA has dropped, focus more on how to properly optimize your content for your target keywords and attract relevant links.
That way you can increase your search rankings.
That said, there’s another question most people ask “what’s a good DA and PA?”
There’s no thumb rule on how much DA or PA a site should have but if you preferably have a DA of more than 65, you tend to rank well for most of the keywords you’re aiming to rank for.
The average DA for most “good websites” is 30.
What’s the bottom line?
Can you outrank your competitors if they have a better DA or PA?
Yes, you absolutely can. It doesn’t matter what your competitors’ DA is.
By focusing on “long-tail keywords” with less search volume, you can easily beat your competitors even if you have a brand new site with less DA. The key here is “quality content & user experience”. If they’re good, you’ll get better rankings over time.
Although the DA score provided by Moz is a great metric to predict the authority of a domain or website, there are a few SOLID alternatives to it.
Here’s a list of some of the best alternatives to Moz DA.
1. Authority score by Semrush
Authority Score is the Semrush tool’s proprietary metric that scores the overall quality of a domain and its influence on SEO.
The score is based on the following data;
- number of backlinks
- referring domains
- organic search traffic and more
You can grab Semrush 30-day free trial to check any website’s Authority Score.
2. Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR)
Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) is equally popular and gives you an overview of the domains with high authority. You can easily find how authoritative a site or domain is by checking the DR which is developed by Ahrefs.
You can check any website’s DR for free by using this tool from Ahrefs.
Currently, BloggersPassion has
- DA from Moz of 49 and
- DR from Ahrefs of 73
As you can see, there’s a huge difference between metrics from two widely used SEO tools Moz and Ahrefs.
Just like Moz DA, Domain Rating (DR) is also measured on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest.
According to Ahrefs, the “logarithmic scale” means that the gap between DR 77–78 is much bigger than the one between DR 27–28. It simply means that the higher your DR gets, the more challenging it will be to grow it by another few points.
Here’s how Ahrefs calculates the DR of a given website.
- Look at how many unique domains have at least 1 do follow link to the target website
- Take into account the DR values of those linking domains
- Take into account how many unique domains each of those websites link to
- Plot these scores on a 0 to 100 scale
The interesting thing about DR is that, if a high DR website links to thousands of other sites, Ahrefs values their links less. But if a low DR website only links to a few sites, Ahrefs considers these links powerful which ultimately helps you get higher DR for your domain.