What is Domain Authority and How can you check it?

What is Domain Authority and How can you check it?

In SEOclerks you must have seen many vendors offering high DA(Domain Authority) backlinks and you must have wondered what is it and why is it important for you to get high DA backlinks for your site?

In the past, all the sites were ranked based on their PR but then DA came in and became a significant factor for a site to rank high in the search engines.


So, What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority is a metric which was invented by Moz(SaaS Company) in which your website is rated between 1 to 100 (1 is the lowest and 100 is the highest).In DA your site is rated according to its authority as a complete domain unlike PA(Page Authority) which is the measure of authority of an individual page in your site.

Domain Authority has around 40 ranking factors which mainly include one fact- The number of other sites linking to your site.


Why is it important?

Suppose you have the Domain Authority of 50 and your competitor has the Domain Authority of 60 then his chances of ranking high in the search engines is greater than yours. So, higher the DA greater is your chance to rank high in the SERPs.

Backlinks are always about “quality” than “quantity” as hundreds of PR1 backlinks are equal to one PR9 backlink. Similarly, it is useless to get thousands of backlinks from low DA sites. Any site having the DA more than 40 can be considered good. More than 70 DA is very good and more than 90 is excellent. You must never try to get backlinks from a site having DA of less than 30 as it is worthless.


Now one question might have come to your mind-

How can I check the DA of my site?

Well, that is very simple. There are a lot of free tools available online which can help you to check your domain authority. You just have to put your websites URL and they will give you DA of your site. One such is the official Moz open site explorer.If you use Chrome or Firefox then you can also use the Moz bar extension which will not only show you the DA of your site but all the sites that you will visit on the internet. One other extension that is also good is the SEOquake extension (by SEMrush) which is also good and gives you a lot of other valuable information as well like Alexa rankings, Google index, Bing index, Backlinks etc.

Quick Tip- Domain Age is an important factor of Domain Authority. So, if you are looking to make a new site try purchasing an older expired domain as it will have good Domain Authority. But make sure to check whether in the past it was used for spamming or not.