You may have seen the little number next to your downloads on your download report, see below – eg DA 56.
So what is this score?
Developed by Moz, this is a score attributed to websites as an indicator as to how well it will rank in search engines. It’s useful as both a measure of your own site’s SEO performance as well as assessing how to choose which blogs and websites to work with.
Scoring starts from 0 up to 100, with 100 being the highest. That helps you grasp, on face value, the effectiveness a site will likely have on Google. It’s also logarithmic which means it is easier to get from a score of 10-20, than from 70-80.
How do they rank sites?
It’s quite a complicated algorithm that takes its cues from Google and Moz’s own metrics – they review over 40 signals! But, one of the key ways Moz derives a score is by reviewing backlinks (websites linking to another). They look at a number of things about those links – both quantity but, importantly, quality. So a link on The Times is going to impact DA more than a few links on lower quality blogs.
My own site’s score
Your score will be impacted by the quality of the links coming into your website and a few other signals. Press Loft generates many natural, free links in high-quality blogs and news sites – this is thought of as the holy grail in the SEO world and can have a big impact on your own domain authority.
Choosing blogs and news sites
When choosing which blogs and influencers to work with we say over 30 is a good score. Generally, the higher the score often the harder it is to get into that blog – or the more money they may want to feature.
Fluctuations – something to bear in mind
Because of the constant changes to Google’s & Moz’s algorithms domain authority scores can fluctuate over time. So Moz says it’s important to not necessarily look too closely at your, or a blog’s, DA over time but, more as a comparison with other blogs at one point in time.
Be patient though, it can take 2 months for links to be picked up and measured by Moz. When we ran some tests of our own we found some links from lower quality blogs were not found. They also do not take into account “nofollow” links (to match Google’s internal structure).
Nb. Moz releases their crawl data to update the ranking once a month (normally towards the end of the month.)
You can read more here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
