If you are new to the SEO world, you might wonder what is better, high or low, Domain Authority (DA). Once you understand what DA measures, it makes perfect sense.
The higher the DA score of your website, the more authoritative and trustworthy the search engines should view your website for the topics it regularly covers. So it follows that the higher your website’s DA score, the more likely it is that your articles will rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This does depend on how well the creator of the DA score measurement does at Mimicking Google’s Page Rank measurement.
In this article, I am going to talk briefly about what DA is and how it is measured so that you know why having a higher DA score is better.
What Is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority or DA is a measurement developed by Moz.com that looks at over 40 website ranking factors that Google uses in its algorithm to predict how well a website will rank in the SERPs.
Moz tries to mimic Google’s Page Rank measurement that it used to publish up until 2013.
Even though DA Moz looks at over 40 ranking factors, the primary factor has to do with the quality and quantity of relevant authoritative articles and domains linked to a given website.
How Is Domain Authority Calculated?
As I said above, Moz looks at not only the number of links from other websites but, more importantly, how relevant those articles are to the city and the industry of your local business website. Relevancy matters more than general authoritativeness in local SEO
After relevancy, Moz looks at the DA score of the websites linking to your site. After relevancy and DA score, Moz then considers the quantity of the links.
Moz also uses a machine learning algorithm to look at the backlink structure of existing websites compared to where they show up in the search engine results for their targeted keywords.
There are other factors in the DA measurement as well. See also my articles “How Do You Measure Domain Authority?” and “What Factors Determine Domain Authority?” for a more in-depth look at these factors.
Does A High DA Score Guarantee High Rankings?
I get this question a lot, and it is a really good question. The obvious answer is no. A DA score is an educated guess of how well an article or website will rank in the SERPs. How accurate it is depends on how good of a job Moz is able to do at learning how all of the factors it looks at affect rankings based on its real-time look at other websites’ rankings, given the 40-plus factors.
If Google still published its Page Rank measurement, then that would be the most accurate and up-to-date measurement based on Google’s current algorithm. But since they no longer publish that, the next best measurement anyone has come up with is Moz and their DA score.
Although nobody can say for sure a higher DA score will result in higher rankings, I can say from my personal experience that it really seems to with the websites I have experience with. It seems to me Moz is still doing a pretty darn good job in producing their DA score.
Final Thoughts
Even our logical common sense tells us that something “more authoritative” would be valued as content more than something less authoritative. We view those terms generally to mean the former knows what they are talking about more than the latter. Hopefully that makes sense.
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