If you are looking for tactics to boost your rankings and gain more organic traffic, you would have surely come across the term Domain Authority. You might have read that domain authority is a crucial factor for search engines in ranking a website. Increasing the domain Authority of your website helps in increasing its ranking.

After reading this statement many people come to the conclusion that their primary focus should be increasing the Domain Authority score of their website. But if you ask any SEO expert, he/she will tell you otherwise.

Increasing Domain Authority score should never be your primary goal or focus. You should focus your efforts on that are causes for an increase in domain authority.

Once you start looking into the causes, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that high-quality backlinks play a crucial role in this whole process. 

High-quality backlinks always come from authoritative websites.

In this article, we’ll cover all the basic concepts you need to know about Domain Authority.

What is domain authority and why is it important?

Domain authority calculator was first introduced by MOZ and since then many other websites have used a similar concept to create tools like the one MOZ initially created.

You might have come across a Domain Rating checker by Ahrefs or similar tools by other websites.

Domain Authority is a metric provided by SEO tools. It generates results by comparing the strength of one website’s backlinks to all the websites present in their index.

Almost all SEO tools offer this tool to their customers, but there might be a difference in the way they calculate Domain authorities of websites. This is the reason why the Domain Authority of a website will differ when calculated by different SEO tools.

As mentioned above. MOZ’s metric is named Domain Authority and Ahrefs call theirs Domain Rating.

Almost All of these metrics run on a scale between zero and a hundred.

Going From a domain authority of 5 to a domain authority of 6 will be substantially easier than going from a domain authority of 66 to a domain authority of 67. The reason behind this is logarithmic calculation. 

The scales for Domain Authority are logarithmic and that is why going from a domain authority of 1 to 2 is easier than going from a domain authority of 9 to 10.

People who are familiar with logarithmic functions will understand this concept better than others.

To simplify this concept let’s take an example of Candy Crush.

When you start playing candy crush, you jump from level 1 to level 2 in just a couple of minutes. As the game keeps progressing, the time in which you complete a level also increases. When you reach more advanced levels like level 500, it may take you hours or even days to jump from one level to another.

Due to the logarithmic scale, a website with a domain authority of 90 will be more than thrice as authoritative as a website with a domain authority of 30.

Factors that influence Domain Authority

Domain Authority calculators take into account several factors while calculating the Domain Authority of a website. The three main factors are

• How many websites are linking to your website?
• Domain authority scores of the websites linking to your website.
• The number of websites each of those websites links to.

How many Websites are linking to your website?

The websites that link to your websites can be called referring domains. Ahrefs SEO tool provides the option of calculating these referring domains.

The result will show the number of websites that are linking to your website.

This number does impact the domain rating but it is not the only attribute of a website that factors in the calculation of domain authority.

A higher number of referring domains doesn’t mean that your website will have a high Domain Authority.

Ahrefs’ SEO tool only takes into account the “followed links”. This means that nofollow, UGC, and sponsored links are not taken into account.

Ahrefs also claims that subsequent links from the same website are also not helpful in increasing the Domain Authority of a website.

Domain Authority scores of websites that are linking to yours

It is very easy to get hundreds and thousands of links from Low-quality websites. Any website can get these within a couple of months.

It is the reason why the Domain Authority of these linking websites is also taken into account. SEO tools like Ahrefs’ Domain Ranking checker, base your domain authority on the domain authority of the websites linking to yours.

Backlinks from websites with high Domain Authority will increase your Domain Authority more as compared to backlinks from websites with low domain authority.

Here is an interesting tidbit for you; If the domain authority of these websites increases in the future, the domain authority of your website will also increase.

This means that if you build a link today with a website that has a Domain Authority of 10 and that website’s owner starts focusing his attention on increasing the Domain authority of his website resulting in an increased Domain authority of 50. The Domain Authority of your website will also increase due to this one link.

SO always focus your attention on websites that have the potential to grow in the future. If a website is posting Quality-content, you should try building a link with it even if it has low domain authority at the time.

You can also identify websites with high growth potential by using Ahrefs’ Website explorer. A steady upwards growth in the graph is a good indicator for you. It means that the Domain Authority of this website will keep on increasing.

The number of websites each of those websites is linking to

Let’s take an example

 you have a website that has two high-quality backlinks, one from Forbes and the other from The New York Times.

Both these websites have the same domain authority.

You’ll assume that both these links will impact the Domain Authority of your website equally since both these websites have the same Domain Authority.

This observation is far from reality because another thing that will impact your Domain Authority will be the number of linking websites, the websites linking to yours have.

As you can see in the Images above, Forbes has 1,307,546 linking websites and The New York Times has 1,580,514 linking websites.

This means that a backlink from Forbes will increase your Domain Authority more than a backlink from The New York Times.

The fewer Linking websites these websites have, the more your Domain Authority will increase.

How You Can Increase the Domain Authority of your website

If you want to increase the Domain Authority of your website, you’ll have to focus all your attention on building high-quality links. Follwed links are the secret to increasing the Domain Authority of a website. Always try to build links with websites with high Domain Authority.

Backlinks from Low-quality websites have a minute effect on the overall Domain authority score of a website.

Avoid building links with random websites. Because these links will not be helpful in the long run.

Bottom Line

Building links with websites of your choice is not always easy. To accomplish this goal you should start focusing your energy on creating unique and high-quality content.

Your valuable content will compel other websites to link to your website.

One thing you should keep in mind is that increasing the score of Domain Authority should never be your primary goal. Your focus should be on building high-quality links with authoritative websites.

The web pages you are building a link with should also be relevant to your content and website. Avoid building random links because they are not worth your time and efforts.

When you’ll start focusing on building high-quality links your website’s Domain Authority score will increase naturally.

What are your goals in terms of the Domain Authority score of your website?

Meta description

Focus on building high-quality links for your website. Domain authority impacts the ranking of your website and high-quality backlinks increase Domain Authority. 

Focus Keyword

Domain Authority