How to improve domain authority
-
I'm having a terrible time with one of my sites - it's a new (less than 1 year) business, and I have accounts
in a number of social media sites including Houzz, but Moz acts like there's only one link to the site. DA is 1.
Ugh. She has pretty good traffic for a small local business, but I'm tearing my hair out over this.
Any suggestions? -
Got it! There are a few possible explanations for what's going on, but the most likely is simply that the links you've gathered—primarily through social network accounts—aren't being seen by the Mozscape index, and so aren't showing up in OSE.
Mozscape's crawler focuses on breadth rather than depth. What that means is that it'll only follow links on any given site so deeply. That allows us to index more sites, but it means that some very deep pages aren't going to be crawled.
In the case of social networks and business directories, just about any outbound links to individual sites are going to be too deep for Mozscape to index. There are just too many listings, and there's a whole lot more internet out there! This generally works out, since there's little if any ranking value in those links—they're not earned—and since the purpose of them tends to be for traffic or for local SEO, rather than for building link count.
To build DA, you'll need to focus on building links from high quality, high authority, relevant sites.
Does that make sense?
-
Thanks Patrick! Hey Matt, I've been working on this site for about 6 months, and really haven't worried too much about the Domain Authority as I was seeing the selected key phrases percolating up. But I'm not seeing things moving as quickly as I would have expected, and have been putting more time into it. I understand this takes time - the one thing I HAVEN'T been doing is putting a lot of effort into backlinks. I have, however, set her up with a variety of social media accounts as well as Houzz (as I indicated in my first message), and Moz shows zero links - which I don't really understand. I believe the users are getting a good experience from the website as the number of visitors increase each week - although the conversions are sporadic, I believe she's getting phone calls from the site.
I believe I'm doing all the right stuff, but something is missing so I must not be.
Thanks for your responses!
-
Hi Cindy!
Patrick has you pretty solidly covered on how to raise DA. Just wondering, though, how long have you been checking this client's DA? More than a month or so?
-
Hi Cindy
There are countless opportunities to improve DA. It's not an overnight endeavor or quick win however. It takes quite a bit of time and effort. Moz actually provides a lot of great resources to help get you started.
Here are some of my favorites:
On-Site Factors - Basic, fundamental items to help get your SEO on solid ground and off to a great start. Local SEO Ranking Factors - Helps get your local SEO off to a great start and also has items you'd probably never think to check.
Moz Academy - Just an overall great educational experience - from local and basic SEO, to content and social media - it's all here.
Moz Local - This is a great managed listings tool to help you better take care of your listings and also update them quickly if need be.
Beginner's Guide to Linkbuilding - Gives you a solid foundation to link building along with types of link building and best practices for each.
How to do a Content Audit - This is a great resource to help you go through the content on your site and help you assess your current issues and pain points.
Internal Linking - This is a great piece to have in your back pocket to help you better utilize your internal linking. Pass your link and search equity in a smart way!
External Linking - Like internal linking, this is a great piece to have as well. Think of who you link to as an endorsement: if crawlers see you're linking to shady sites, they will associate you with those sites. But, if you are linking to high quality, authoritative, and relevant to your content sites, then search engines will value your site more. If you care, they will care.
Information Architecture for SEO - This will help you lay your site out in an easy to understand fashion for both your users and search engines.
The Massive Ranking Factor Too Many SEOs are Ignoring - SUCH a great Whiteboard Friday piece - this helps you understand direct and indirect ranking factors in an easy to digest fashion. While there are no "hard tactics" to take from this, it will help you better connect your SEO and marketing efforts, and why you do things the way you do.I know there is a LOT here, but really, there is a lot that goes into your Domain Authority. It will take a lot of the information above (and more honestly) and moving them together in a way that best fits your client's site and industry. Please the user first and worry about search engines second - they will catch up and your domain authority will reflect that. Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Should I disavow links from Dead Domains?
Have a new client who hired a fly-by-night backlinking company. They made 500 links from directories and 160 of these are on domains that have been deleted. So should I inlcude the 160 dead links in my disavow?
Link Building | | dk50 -
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 -
Getting a sitewide links from one domain as oppsed to few links from certain pages, a good, bad or horrible idea?
Hello, I have a website that is performing really well in Google for country specific Real Estate Website. I have had this site for just about 2 years and I have 4600+ indexed pages, and about 50 of my main keywords appear in top 10 results on Google. I have now started a second site with a brand new domain, its only about 2 months old. This one is a Travel website and again its country specific (same country that real estate website is performing well in) and since its still building up the content and has barely a couple of backlinks, I am thinking of adding a linkback to it from my Real Estate Site. Is it a good idea to add a site wide link back from header section of the real estate website to my travel website? Both sites has same country and most of the keywords in both relate to this country. Or will I be better off adding a few text links from few pages with best Page Authority? Or - do you suggest that I do not link the two at all? Both sites are hosted on different servers, with different IP's and one is on windows server created in asp.net while another is a magento site. Any advidce / insight will be much appreciated and thank you in advance.
Link Building | | waituk_sanjeev0 -
Custom Domain Vs Free Sub Domain for SEO
What is your take on custom domain vs free sub domain for SEO? (example.com vs example.blogspot.com) Say if I have 10 links from 10 different domains but all hosted on blogger.com, will it still have the same link benefit as ones hosted on different hosting account? I am assuming it might be less due to the same C class IP appearing for blogger hosting. What do you think?
Link Building | | jombay0 -
Two Links in one Article to One Domain
Will multiple links in a single article to one target domain (but seperate pages) count, or just the first link of that article? Thanks, Chris
Link Building | | Diderino0 -
It is ok to link together multiple domains on the same ip?
I have multiple domains (more than 50) in the same niche. All domains are on the same ip. It is ok to link them together, or to create a piramid link between them?
Link Building | | maldiniii0 -
What is the best way to find high domain authority
Hi Guys, Can you anyone tell me please the best way to find high domain authority websites? I heard this is the best way to build links? Thanks Gareth
Link Building | | GAZ090 -
Root domain registered in search engines, inbound links to www sub-domain. A problem?
I just discovered that our site is registered with the major search engines without the "www" sub domain. Both domains resolve directly to our site, which I need to get corrected. I had planned to have the root (honestabe.com) forwarded to the sub (www.honestabe.com). However, I then found that the sub-domain is not listed with the search engines. Of course, naturally almost all of our inbound links include www. Does Google differentiate between links with and without the sub-domain? In other words, if I forward the www address to the root, will I still get the SEO benefit of those inbound links using www? I'm trying to figure out how to approach this. I'm hoping someone is going to make me feel really stupid for asking this and say it's no big deal. However, I have a feeling this could be a mess.
Link Building | | honestabejosh0