What is Domain authority?
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that was developed by Moz to predict how well a website will rank in search engine results pages. The score is given between one and 100, with higher scores meaning a greater ability to rank.
The calculation is made by evaluating over 40 different ranking signals, including the quality of linking domains, the number of total links and the age of the domain.
Moz’s DA scale is logarithmic, which means the higher your domain authority, the harder it is to improve your score. For example, going from a Domain Authority of 10-20 takes a lot less effort than going from 50-60.
Is Domain Authority still relevant?
Moz say for themselves that “you should always use Domain Authority as a relative metric” and this is due to the fact that Authority is based on machine learning calculations. With this in mind, you shouldn’t directly take DA as to how well your overall SEO efforts are doing. At Bigger Picture, we often find that we are able to successfully take new domains (from as low as 1) into the number one spot on Google’s search engine results pages for competitive, high traffic, local search terms. If you are interested then you can take a further look at the SEO services we offer.
The effects of DA 2.0
With the update launched, we’ve seen heavy fluctuations in the Domain Authority of many websites across all niches. Have you checked your site’s DA? If not, you can have a look here.
Take a look at what Moz themselves have to say about their new DA update.