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Domain Authority’s Ranking Myth

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For years already, Domain Authority has been an immensely important factor in the belief of Google’s factors for ranking. The higher the DA, the better. So if you have a lot of backlinks with high DA, that’s a good thing. If your website has high DA, that’s also a good thing. This means that the authority of your domain has grown over time.

But because this is in fact created by another party, is it really possible that Google has used this for its own list of factors for ranking?

Domain Authority was created by MOZ. It is a “search engine ranking score” designed to determine if a website will rank on search engines. The scoring ranges from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the better.

 

MOZ has stated a number of times on how this score is being calculated. A few of those reasons include things like, the total number of backlinks and root domains.

One interesting detail is that MOZ themselves has stated that the DA score is NOT a metric used by Google. So where did this myth come from in the first place?

There can be a lot of sources for this, one of which is multiple agencies out there clamoring and desperate enough to make things up in order to get to sell more to clients.

This is more evident when there were mass panic when the news broke out recently that MOZ updated their system for the domain authority scoring. Yes, SEO’s were panicking. It had to have multiple articles written online to explain (and re-explain) everything that’s happening and whether or not everyone will get affected or not.

Most SEO’s over the years have been heavily dependent on this metric that whenever this gets updated, they panic.

And just to be completely clear, if your domain authority does drop, your rankings will not be affected.

There can also be a momentary confusion since it is basically measuring the score according to the number or amount of backlinks a website has. But what we may forget most of the time, the amount of backlinks is just one of many factors Google uses to help your website rank.

 

One of the most usual problems when link building is this very belief. Looking for sites to build links to according to the domain authority score is actually one of the most dire things and ways on how to approach link building.

What you should instead be looking at when checking websites for building links on, is content and relevance.

There are a lot of new websites today all out on the web that could have great relevant and high quality content. But since they are in fact new sites, they will not have good amounts of domain authority. And that’s the very essence of all of this. Just because a site has high scoring domain authority, doesn’t mean that it actually contains content that can be relevant today.

Checking for reviews about those sites is also a better option. DA is good, but don’t limit your options on it alone. Keep your view a bit wider when it comes to factors for checking websites. Like our recent example, imagine if a website is still new, but again, it has good relevant content and a whole slew of positive reviews online. For sure the trustworthiness here will be good enough for your link building activities.

Although it has been proven, so many times that domain authority is not a ranking factor for Google, it shouldn’t be completely dismissed. It was created and being continuously updated for a reason. And that’s to measure whether or not your website can indeed nail the ranking game to the wall effectively or not.