Domain Authority (“DA”) is a score developed by Moz, an SEO and marketing company that develops tools to optimize websites.
Their score predicts how your website will rank in search engines.
Domain Authority ranges from 0 to 100, with a higher score linked to a higher chance of ranking.
How Does Domain Authority Work?
Domain Authority scores rely on Moz’s machine learning system.
The machine learning system generates a self-updating algorithm, which compares your external links against other search results across search engines. It scans and updates to predict the probability of your website’s ranking. The algorithm studies your data and creates a score.
Your Domain Authority can help determine the effectiveness of your website’s SEO.
What Is Considered a High DA Score?
Domain Authority’s machine learning system is constantly updating itself.
A score assigned to your website is not final, and can fluctuate often. Scores don’t usually increase dramatically. Successful websites are continually acquiring data and building external links that lead to their landing pages. Domain Authority is a comparative score that measures performance against other websites and is not a definitive grade.
Generally, a new website’s score is 1, and increases as it builds backlinks.
To improve your score, the most effective way is link building. The more quality links from external websites, the higher your Domain Authority.
The domains of blue-chip companies take up the higher end of the score range (i.e. 75-100), and leave the lower and mid-range scores for newer websites.
Changes in Domain Authority
Domain Authority shifts based on the performance of other websites as well as yours.
Common reasons for a score change are the rate of your link growth.
It is also possible that newer links to your website are not a part of Moz’s web index.
Link quality can also be a factor – if your links come from irrelevant sources or unrelated anchor text.
To stay up to date on your website’s Domain Authority, make use of the various tools by Moz (i.e. Link Explorer, MozBar, Keyword Explorer, etc.)
