What are the best ways of improving our domain authority?
-
My site's domain authority has gone down by a few points recently. What the best ways of increasing it? It's currently 29 out of 100. What is a good domain authority number?
-
I'll chime in on the '**what is a good domain number authority'. **
I hope this is an obvious point... There's no magic number. I would suggest that it depends on your vertical, and the keywords for which you are trying to rank. Quick tip - use the SEOmoz SERP overlay tool . When you're doing searches for your target keywords, you can get a quick/rough idea of the type of domain authority/number of linking root domains that will be necessary to be in the conversation for page 1 rankings.
-
It is likely that your domain authority went down because the size of the index used by OSE shrank significantly. Last month they indexed about 72 billion URLs, compared to 150 billion the month before. This month they indexed even less, something like 68 billion URLs.
If some of your backlinks weren't indexed this time, you'll lose domain authority. There's not a lot you can do about the index shrinking, unless you can provide a few million dollars worth of Hardware for SEOmoz to use.
-
Links from other authoritative sites that are relavent and/or entertaining to your audience will help you gain authority. As long as the users that get to your site and like what they see, share what they see (give you an endorsement) and or bookmark it, you gain authority. Think of it from a user perspective, if you entertain them, educate them, or offer them something of interest they will naturally link to your site.
The anchors to your site must look natural as well. be sure that your inbound links are built mostly of your URL or brand name.
-
Agree with Greg. Also, links from well linked sites typically help the most (as I'm sure everyone knows).
-
The more linking Root Domains you have, the higher the authority grows.
Obtaining 100 links from the same websites is no were near as valuable as 100 links from 100 different websites. This will improve your Domain Authority.
Greg
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
-
Exact match domain - should i use one
i have the domain "region"familyholidays.co.uk for an upcoming site. i was pleased as its memorable and tells the user what its about. i am targetting keywords such as: region family holidays region family hotels region famliy cottages region family campsites is it something i should avoid because of potential penalties. i will be adding plenty of good content and doing all the offsite things but dont want to start with a handicap with an emd? thanks neil
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | neilhenderson0 -
Buy exact match domain and 301 worth it?
So there is this exact match domain that gets about 500 visitors a day. it has trust flow 17 and citation flow of 23 which is just a little lower than our own website. The website talks about one of our keywords and rank on second page in SERPs. I am not interested in buying and running that website, but rather just to liquidate all the pages with 301s into our existing domain and onto relevant pages. So the 301s would be to relevant pages. The question is, would this strategy be worth it in todays SEO world and Google updates?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TVape0 -
Domain change after over optimisation
Hi Guys, Wanted to get some second opinions. I have a client who worked with someone on their SEO for about 15months, during which time they reaped the benefits of being top of Googles organic rankings for their main keyword. Unfortunately, the link building that was completed was terrible with no care taken for future updates, over optimised anchor text links on totally irrelevant websites. Contacting webmasters in order for links to be taken down was an impossible task, these websites were pure spam sites which I doubt anyone oversees with any care. So went the disavow route, it caused a slight increase, but the way Google indexes the website and its pages is still all over the place. We have a good new content marketing plan in place for the next 12 months, and already have some great in depth articles, videos and interactive infographics created, but the problem is my client really needs some quick wins and cannot risk the domain never recovering fully from the issues. They own the .com version of the .co.uk they have so my thoughts at this point are to move them to the .com, and the new content strategy can be worked on as if its a new project. For the keywords they target there are sites on the 1st and 2nd page with DA of 16-18, so it wont take long with the new content we have to get them back to a level playing field with the competition. The one worry I do have is Google seeing the .co.uk go down, and the .com appear with the same website on and looking down on the "start from scratch" method.... does anyone know of any examples when they have acted on this? We started an AdWords account (very small spend) and this has been going to the .co.uk, if we start a new one, with same billing info going to the .com could that also cause problems? So basically, because of my clients situation, and the level the competition is it, moving to the .com seems like the best move, its just whether there is any risk involved. I've never read of there being any, but thought I'd get some opinions before comitting to it. By the way, I'm only seeing this as a feasible option as they can still keep branded traffic due to buying both domains at the same time. Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gamnaking10 -
Alt tag best practices for a mutli gallery site with hundreds of images
I have neglected to add alt tags to one of my sites, and am ready to tackle the project. I want to make sure I do not do something that will have a negative impact on rankings....and I have not been able to find info that fits my situation. The pics are all about a product I make and sell through the site. I have a free gallery section that has about 10 galleries with about 20 pics each. Each gallery page has a different model and/or context of how the product. might be used. These are not sales pages directly just thumbnail galleries linked to larger images for the viewers enjoyment. I have 10 or so keyword phrases that would be good to use, with the intent to start getting listed in google images and other rank enhancements. Can I choose one keyword phrase as my alt tag choice for a whole gallery and give each individual large pic in the gallery that same alt tag, And use a different phrase for the next gallery's pics etc.? Or is that thought of as stuffing, and I would have to come up with a different keyword phrase for each pic? I hope that makes sense. Thanks Galen
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tetruss0 -
Keyword Specific Domain | Outranking trend
Hey everyone, i looked for a similar question but didnt found anything. Ive been having a lot trouble competing with other websites that use the "exact-keyword" domain (www.keyword.com), then they just stuff some mediocre content and rank 1-3 in Google SERP for that keyword I wasnt worried before because i thought they were going to be penalized or decreased in ranking. But they bought several keyword domains and outrank everyone in almost every word. Their conversion rate cant be that good because of the mediocre content, but still i dont like the fact that they rank better just because of the keyword. Any comment on this? , what would you do? Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JesusD0 -
New sub-domain launches thousands of local pages - is it hurting the main domain?
Would greatly appreciate some opinions on this scenario. Domain cruising along for years, top 1-3 rankings for nearly all top non-branded terms and a stronghold for branded searches. Sitelinks prominently shown with branded searches and always ranked #1 for most variations of brand name. Then, sub-domain launches that was over 80,000 local pages - these pages are 90-95% similar with only city and/or state changing to make them appear like unique local pages. Not an uncommon technique but worrisome in a post Panda/Penguin world. These pages are surprisingly NOT captured as duplicate content by the SEOMoz crawler in my campaigns. Additionally about that same time a very aggressive, almost entirely branded paid search campaign was launched that took 20% of the clicks previously going to the main domain in organic to ppc. My concern is this, shortly after this launch of over 80k "local" pages on the sub-domain and the cannibalization of organic clicks through ppc we saw the consistency of sitelinks 6 packs drop to 3 sitelinks if showing at all, including some sub-domains in sitelinks (including the newly launched one) that had never been there before. There's not a clear answer here I'm sure but what are the experts thoughts on this - did a massive launch of highly duplicate pages coupled with a significant decrease in organic CTR for branded terms harm the authority of the main domain (which is only a few dozen pages) causing less sitelinks and less strength as a domain or is all this a coincidence? Or caused by something else we aren't seeing? Thanks for thoughts!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
How best to do Location Specific Pages for Eccomerce Post Panda Update..
Hi , We have an eCommerce site and currently we have a problem with duplicate content. We created Location specific landing pages for our product categories which initially did very well until the recent Google Panda update caused a big drop in ranking and traffic. example http://xxx.co.uk/rent/lawn-mower/London/100 http://.xxx.co.uk/rent/lawn-mower/Manchester/100 Much of the content on these location pages is the same or very similar apart from different H1 tag, title tag and in some cases slight variations on the on page content but given that these items can be hired from 200 locations it would take years to have unique content for every location for each category... We did this originally in April as we can't compete nationally but we found it was easier to compete locally ,hence the creation of the location pages and it did do well for us until now. My question is , since the last Google Panda update, our traffic has dropped 40% , and rankings have gone through the floor and we are stuck with this mess Should we get rid off (301 ) all of the location specific pages for each of the categories ot just keep say 10 locations per cities as the most popular ones and either do No follow no index the other locations or 301's or what would people recommend ? The only examples I can see on the internet that others do with multiple locations is to have a store finder type thing... but you cant' rank for the individual product /category doing it that way... If anyone has any advice or good examples of sites I could see that employ a good location url specific method, please let me know. thanks Sarah
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SarahCollins0