Domain Authority - quality scoring
-
Hey All:
Got a question about domain authority value. I'm reviewing our link profile and I'm trying to figure out if there are any links to our domain we should disavow. I'm also looking at some of our competitor link profiles to see if we are missing out on any quality websites that could be linking to us. To evaluate this, I'm looking at the domain authoriy of any of the websites in question. Thus, my question is two-fold.- At what point in time is Domain authority too low, necessitating us to get rid of the inbound link?2) How high should a DA value be to have us try to build an inbound link from to our website?
FYI: our website home page has a page authority of 49 and a domain authority of 43.
Thanks for your help
Stephan
-
Thanks for all the feedback guys. Our site actually climbed in rankings over the last month for the core keywords we are trying to optimize. We'll continue to build great content.
thanks for everything
-
Hi Stephen,
Do you believe your ranking is being affected by spammy/low quality or artificial links? Are you jumping on the disavow tool for a reason or is this a pre-emptive measure? Have you considered or tried to get any links that you are concerned about removed manually?
Google recommend that you use the Disavow tool only if:
1. your believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site
2. your confident that your site's performance in the search results is being harmed
DA alone isn't going to tell you which sites are spammy, artificial or low-quality. As Chris mentioned you'll need to take a broader view and look at the linking pages, their link profiles, the anchor text they're using their relevance to your site. (If someone said, hey I saw your link on site x, how would you feel about that?)
A link doesn't just provide authority, but also relevance, both in it's anchor text and context. You'll need to look at how natural these are, not over-optimised exact match/site wide/keyword anchor text and from a legitimate site as far as Google and your customer/audience are going to interpret it.
Just because a site has low DA, doesn't mean it's a bad place to get a link from! Some markets/niches are very small. Sites in that niche may be likely to have few links BUT they attract a highly relevant audience. While a link from one of these sites may do little to boost your domain authority it may give you some great exposure and drive a small amount of highly relevant (or high intent) visits to your site.
Make sure you know which links are passing you traffic. After all, we're not really here just for the rankings, it's the traffic we're after. You don't want sever the link that's passing high value visitors/customers.
Look at the back link profiles of your competitors (not just one or two) to get a feel for what is natural in your market/niche. Don't just look at the top ranking sites though as this can give you a skewed impression. Look at those businesses that are (respected) business competitors - not just the ones that are competing at the top of the SERPs.
As EGOL says, build great content (or offerings) and if you're going to build links do it to promote your content to your target audience.
You might also find this article on Link Profiling of interest:
Link Profile Tool to Discover Paid Links or Other Anomalous Linking Activity
And one final point - Domain Authority is just a Moz metric, it's only ever going to be an estimate how Google views the "link equity" of a site.
-
I would recommend basing disavows / removals on:
1. Relevancy of Linking Website
2. Paid Link Assessment (How does the website tend to link to external websites?)
3. Social Engagement of Linking Website
4. Overall Content Quality Assessment
5. Inbound Link Assessment (if necessary)
6. Domain AuthorityThis way, as both Chris and Egol mentioned, you probably will not run into the risk of removing a link that could grow to be powerful down the road.
Low authority links from highly relevant websites where the link is natural (editorial in nature) and in content that is high quality are perfectly find (and good)
Hope this Helps,
Todd -
1) At what point in time is Domain authority too low, necessitating us to get rid of the inbound link?
Tiny acorns grow into mighty oak trees.
Keep in mind that domain authority is not an accurate measure of quality or potential.
If the Pope launches a new site would you "get rid of a link" from it while its domain authority is less than 10?
2) How high should a DA value be to have us try to build an inbound link from to our website?
Take the energy that you are putting into links and put it into creating content that people will want to share with one another. If you can do that then all of your effort will go into producing assets for your website... and the people who see it will spread the word for you.
-
Stephan,
It's hard to go strictly by the numbers, as some worthwhile niche sites may never develop great amounts of domain authority. Your best bet is to go to the sites and check them out. It doesn't take much to get a feel for whether its a real site that's up to date with real information that is useful to your visitors and theirs. Look at the home page, look at the page with the link, look at their back links, look at the pages that show up the top of a site:domain search, and make sure the homepage show up in the search results for a selected quote from it. It's a very touchy-feely process.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How would I increase the domain authority of my website?
Hi, I am Kyle. I have a affiliate related website where I update articles that is related to Dental Tools. I want to improve my Website . Any one can guide me that how can I increase it.
Link Building | | rankvizguru1 -
Should I change a domain name with a good score for a newly registered one
Hi I have inherited a website http://www.hanmersprings.net.nz/ Domain sore 17 The website promotes Rippinvale so I want to register a domain rippinvale.com and direct the old domain to the new one. Is this the best way to do this to maximise the link authority?
Link Building | | VelocityWebsites0 -
Backlinks from the Same Domain (But Different Pages)
Wayyy back when (in the days of yore) Mr Cutts spelled out in a video that page rank is distributed equally between the external links on the page. If there are two links on a page, each gets passed 50% of the available page rank etc. (Perhaps an oversimplification but bear with me). As a result of this, the company I worked for at the time (this was the dark ages when sidebar homepage links were in vogue) decreed that we would only ever approach a site about a link for a client once, as additional links had little extra SEO Value. Now you could argue that if there are 5 external links, each acquiring 20% of the power, and your site has 2 of those, you are getting 40% of the power, but lets forget the basic math for a minute. I have scoured the web and Mr Cutts' videos and I cannot find the answer to my question: If my site (Site A) has a backlink from SiteB Page 1, and a backlink from SiteB page 2 - does this count as two separate links in the eyes of Google? If the SAME site links out to my site, linking to different pages in different posts, does this give me more SEO benefit? Thanks for your time!
Link Building | | Turkey0 -
External Linking for ROOT DOMAIN METRICS
Is there a way, we can find out External Equity-Passing Links for Root Domain Metrics for a particular website. I am unable to find that out and need it for competitive analysis. Please let me know if someone knows the solution.
Link Building | | sidjain4you0 -
What is a good ratio of total links to linking root domains?
Is 100 total links for every linking domain too high? I suppose I could also look at ratios of sites that are doing well in the rankings.
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Ads and their relatonship to Domain Aurthority
I was wondering if serving 6 or 7 ads on a webpage would have a negative effect on a websites Domain Authority. Regards, Jeffrey Strassman
Link Building | | biggieshaws0 -
Multiple LInks from the same domain - how much benefit do they give?
I'm wondering how much added benefit there is to gaining multiple links from the same domain? For example when looking at a competitor in open site explorer I see they have 239 linking domains but 5,066 links. How much additional benefit are they getting over just having 239 links from 239 domains? Also how many links is an optimal number from a domain in that case before there become no more point seeking links from that domain? 5? 10? Thanks
Link Building | | performagen1 -
Page Rank, Domain Rank, Link Building....Oh my!
Hi Everyone, So I am looking into a couple of sites that we can use for press release distribution. Naturally, I am looking for sites that will improve our SEO (sites that have a high domain authority). I guess I am just trying to wrap my head around the whole domain/page authority and how it effects our SEO. So for example, I am looking at prlog.org. They have an overall domain authority of 91...sweet! Is this all I should be looking at when I am looking to place a press release, which will include targeted links using appropriate anchor text? If I drill down even further to the actual section that the press release will live on, which will be the security section of the site, the page authority is a 49. Is this what I should be looking at? Do I have to drill down even further and look at the page rank for the actual URL that my press release will actually live on? I am assuming since it will be a totally new page that the page authority will be very low. Is this correct? Should I be looking at a combination of the two? The page authority of 49 is pretty low but the domain authority is very high. What does this mean for my SEO and my links? In a nutshell I need to know what I should be looking at for SEO purposes, is it domain authority, is it page authority of the section the site will live on or is it the actual page that my press release lives on. Is it a combination? What would you do in this situation? Also, could you give me a little more insight into when a low domain/page authority can actually hurt you. What the threshold where you get no link juice or are actually penalized? Do you have any insight in the domain/page domain number that is considered not worth it? Thanks all! Pat
Link Building | | PatBausemer0