How to Improve your Domain Authority

| September 10, 2020 | Blog, Website Authority | No Comments

If you want to get more organic traffic to your site and to rank higher in Google, then, you might have read that increasing your websites, authority is the solution.

However, the truth is that while increasing site authority is not a bad thing, increasing the score itself mustn’t be your primary focus. What you should do is to check on what makes your site’s score rise, which is the high-quality backlinks from firm websites.

In this guide, I will discuss:

  • What website authority is
  • How it is calculated
  • And How you can increase your Domain Rating.

What is Website Authority?

Website authority is a system of measurement from SEO tool providers. It measures the relative strength of a site’s backlink compared to another site in their index.

Pretty much every big SEO tool has this metric, though its name and how it’s calculated differs. The Ahrefs site authority metric is a Domain Rating (DR) running on a scale from 0–100.

NOTE: You may check your domain’s authority using the free authority website checker. Now, it’s important to comprehend that the scale for Domain Rating is logarithmic clearly. Meaning, it’s more challenging to go from DR 69–70 than 9–10.

The logarithmic scale means that a DR 20 website is twice as ‘authoritative’ as a DR 10 website.

How is the Domain Rating (authority) calculated?

Before you try to increase your website authority, you first need to know how the Domain Rating is calculated.

So, let’s go through the four main things that have an impact on Domain Rating.

  1. The number of sites that are linking to you.
  2. The DR scores of linking domains.
  3. The number of websites each referring domain links to.
  4. The number of sites that are linking to you

In Ahrefs, there is a metric called referring domains. It is the number of sites that link to a page or site.

example 1

Some might think that the higher the number, the higher the Domain Rating. But it’s not that simple because we take ‘followed’ links into account in our calculations.

Also, subsequent links from the same site don’t improve a site’s rating since we only count referring domains and not backlinks.

  1. The DR scores of linking domains

Anyone can get thousands of links from low-quality sites. That’s why we should take into account that the DR score of the linked site when you calculate DR.

This means that backlinks from online sites with high DR scores increase Domain Rating more than those with the low DR scores.

example 2

What you can learn here is that it really pays also to build links from online sites that have potential, even though their DR scores are a bit low at the time.

How to Increase Your Domain Rating

You can build more ‘followed’ links to your website, and your Domain Rating will definitely increase. Keep in mind that if the website you get a link from has a low DR score, or links out to many websites, the increase in DR may be small.

It’s also vital to note that building links to casual pages won’t help increase your rankings or any organic traffic. As that’s your end goal, you should put more focus on building links directly to pages that you want to rank in Google. That will have a great impact on organic traffic and the rankings than to simply “increasing DR.”

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