Domain Authority (DA) is a score determined by Moz to estimate the ranking position of a website in search engines such as Google. Defined as a score between 1 and 100, it is a fundamental ranking metric since it can predict the relevancy of the website’s pages for a number of queries, and will directly influence the number of daily visitors.
Having a high domain authority is extremely important to boost a website’s CTR. It is also used to determine how “juicy” are the links you will provide to the other sites you link to. If you’re open-minded enough to start thinking out of the box a little bit, here are a few useful tips to effectively raise your DA.
- Fix your broken links
Did you know that a broken link may penalize a page? Albeit this penalty is usually very small, if the number of broken links is high enough the malus will slowly add up until it becomes noticeable. Many people don’t even know how many broken links exist on their website, even if there are many good tools and plugins to identify and remove them automatically.
- Fix other people’s broken links as well
Other than just fixing your own broken links, you can look out for other people’s ones. Why? That’s simple: because if you find someone else’s dead link, you may always offer him the opportunity to replace it with one coming from your website that actually works. Just run a full backlink audit on a website of your choice, you’ll find plenty of them.
You’re doing them a favor, you know. Not only you will have the chance to choose the best anchor, but you can also probably take advantage of earning a backlink from an age-old page with high authority.
- Try disavowing malicious links
Malicious and bad links are a hidden, yet important issue that affects a lot of websites. Maybe your site has been attacked by hackers or spammers, or it has received a lot of unwanted backlinks coming from warez or adult material sites. Even a large number of links coming from non-relevant sites or websites that changed their identity may damage your domain authority, especially if your website is old enough.
If the overall quality of your backlinks falls below a certain threshold, your DA score will be substantially impacted. Conducting a regular link audit is, therefore, critical to disavow all the potentially malicious links and make Google happy again!
- Do not use black hat SEO strategies
Raising your DA is not easy. Moz checks your ratings once every 2-3 months, so it often looks that your score simply doesn’t budge from its place. It’s hard to understand which strategies you used actually worked, because in such a long time many things may happen. However, you should always think of DA as a long-term investment. Because of that, all instant satisfaction-based strategies which may spike it up temporarily are not a good idea.
There are many black hat SEO tricks out there that can help you cheat your way to the highest DA rankings. However, these tactics are all fake short-term bonuses that will lose their traction after a very short time. They will eventually harm your DA (and your entire website) in the long run. They’re not worth it, especially since once a penalty to the DA is settled, it may take a very long time to get rid of it.
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