Domain Authority Checker
Updated: Nov 6
What is Domain Authority Checker and why is it so important?
Domain Authority (DA) was developed by a company called Moz and is a search engine ranking score. This score is able to see where your website ranks in search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores go from one to one hundred. The higher your website’s domain authority score is, the better your chance of a high ranking in search engines. Domain Authority is worked out according to data from Moz’s Link Explorer web index. It uses many factors in its calculations. The actual Domain Authority calculation uses a learning model that predictively finds a “best fit” algorithm that most closely correlates with the link data of rankings across thousands of actual search results. Moz uses these as standards to scale against.
How is Domain Authority actually calculated?
Domain Authority is calculated by assessing multiple factors. These include linking root domains and the total number of links, into one single DA score. This score is then used when tracking the “ranking strength” of a website over time. It should be noted that Domain Authority is not a Google ranking factor and therefore has no effect on the SERPs.
In early 2019, Moz made a Domain Authority 2.0 update. As mentioned previously, the calculation of a DA score comes from a machine learning algorithm’s predictions about how often Google is using that domain in its search results. For example, domain A is more likely to appear in a Google SERP than domain B is. We would then expect domain A’s DA to be higher than domain B’s DA.
Since DA is based on machine learning calculations, your site’s score often fluctuates as different data points become available and are incorporated into those calculations. For example, if facebook.com acquired a billion new links, every other site’s DA would drop relative to Facebook’s. As more authoritative and established domains like Facebook will have increasingly larger link profiles, they can take up more of the high-DA slots. This leaves less room at the higher end of the scale for other domains with less robust link profiles. Because of this, it is significantly easier to grow your score from 20 to 30 than it is to grow it from 70 to 80. For this reason, it’s important to use the Domain Authority checker tool as a comparative metric rather than an absolute one.
How can I check my website’s Domain Authority?
Moz’s website is super helpful and easy to navigate. Have a look at Moz’s Link Explorer, the MozBar (Moz’s free SEO toolbar), or the SERP Analysis section of Keyword Explorer and with these, you can find out what the Domain Authority is of any website. Domain Authority data is also incorporated into all Moz Pro campaigns, the Moz API, and many SEO and online marketing platforms across the web.
What is a good Domain Authority score?
Websites with very large numbers of high-quality backlinks (such as wikipedia.com or google.com) will be at the top end of the Domain Authority scale. So small businesses and websites with fewer relevant backlinks would have much lower DA scores. Try exploring Moz’s list of the top 500 sites on the web. This can help you to understand what impact that Domain Authority and other link-based data metrics have on a website’s popularity. A brand-new site always starts with a Domain Authority score of one. This score increases as the website earn more and more authoritative backlinks over time. Link building is a good practice for new websites.
How do I increase my website’s Domain Authority?
The best way to affect your site’s Domain Authority data metric is to improve your website’s overall SEO health. Use SEO tools to do this and it is helpful to put an SEO strategy in place. Also, approach other websites to see if they can become referring domains. Offering a reciprocal link will improve your chances of success. With SEO there should be a particular focus on the quality and quantity of external links pointing to your site. Because Domain Authority is calculated with so many pieces of data, it can be difficult to influence the ranking factor. This data metric should predict how competitive a given site will be in search engine results, and since Google considers dozens of ranking factors in ascertaining its rankings, a metric that tries to approximate its findings must incorporate a similar number and complexity of factors.
Why did my Domain Authority change?
Because Domain Authority comprises multiple calculations and metrics, finding the exact cause of a change can be difficult. If your score has fluctuated, there are many potential influencing factors including:
Your link profile growth has not yet been captured in Moz’s web index.
The websites with high Domain Authority experienced substantial link growth, skewing the scaling process.
You earned backlinks from websites that don’t contribute to Google rankings.
Moz crawled (and included in their index) more or fewer of your websites linking domains than they had in a previous crawl.
Your Domain Rating is on the lower end of the scoring spectrum and is, therefore, more impacted by scaling fluctuations.
Your website was affected by the 2019 implementation of Domain Authority 2.0. This caused a 6% average decrease in DA across all sites because of restructuring and improvements to the way DA is calculated.
The key to understanding Domain Authority fluctuations is acknowledging that each domain score depends on comparison to other reputable sites all across the DA scale. Even if a website improves its SEO, its DA score will not always reflect that. Domain Authority works in a similar way. Since it’s based on a machine learning model and is constantly compared against every other site on the scale, after each update, recalculations mean that the score of a given site could decrease even if that site has improved its link profile and used quality content. This is the nature of a relative, scaled system. Therefore DA scores are best viewed as comparative rather than absolute metrics.
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