Raise my Domain Authority and MozRank

[trickyzoo]

I have a budget of about $10,000 over the next 2 months and I would like to raise my Domain Authority from 28 to past 50. What should I do with this money? I am looking for suggestions and ideas.

If anybody wants to work on this, please PM me.

I also need an On Page SEO expert to make corrections and suggestions.

I can PM the actual domain to anybody interested.

[blake-76624]

I would think it would be rather difficult to raise your Authority that high in a couple of months although I'm sure it's possible.  My first thing I would do if you haven't already is register your domain for 10 years.   I felt like that gave me a good bit of domain authority.

[RyanKent]

I have a budget of about $10,000 over the next 2 months and I would like to raise my Domain Authority from 28 to past 50.

The first thought I would like to share is on the DA measurement. If you are using the MOZbar or OSE, the changes you make can take more then 60 days to appear. While your Google search results will benefit from the increased DA much sooner, you should not expect to see the increased DA until two months after a link is established.

While raising your DA from 28 to 50 is a worthy goal, it is a means to an end. I make few guarantees in this life, but I can guarantee the ability to raise your DA from 28 to 50. The problem is with the proposal you made I think you will attract the wrong type of attention. There are a lot of questionable SEO tactics in use, and frankly it is quite easy to manipulate a statistical measurement such as DA. For example, there are tons of blogs and forums in china which are PR7+ sites. Many link builders will visit those sites, paste links to your site and then OSE will simply read the link and increase your DA. The problem is Google usually recognizes those links are worthless and your site receives no benefit from them. The bottom line, you paid to have your DA increased, but you really wanted to increase traffic, sales or conversions.

My recommendation is to share your end goal and work with your SEO to determine how best to achieve it. Improved DA is not of value unless it is real meaning the links are authentic links which Google values. Even if you have good DA, you still need quality content to rank well. With quality content and good DA, you may rank well but page titles, meta descriptions, urls, etc. all impact whether users actually click on your search result. Once you actually receive the traffic on your site, the next step is your on page setup to convert that traffic.

If you can share your URL, we can offer more specific advise. Depending on your current site, some ideas for your budget:

• Trust symbols: BBB, Verisign, TRUSTe, etc.

• Generating world-class content. Expert articles, infographics, videos, etc. all have potential to drive traffic

• creating a widget which links to your site. As an example, if you have a travel site you can create a world time / weather / currency exchange rate widget.

• Site improvements. Some sites spend thousands on CSS design and it pays off. If you can make a site that looks so great people talk about how great it looks, you are on to something.

• There are a few link directories worthy of joining: Yahoo, BOTW, Business.com

• Giveaways and other social promotions

There are tons of additional ideas but these are a few to get started. The question is, which methods provide the biggest bang for the buck, and how flexible are you on raising your DA versus other methods of improving traffic or conversion rates.

[RyanKent]

Hi Blake.

I hate to disagree with you on your first Q&A post but I believe the information you are sharing is incorrect. Increasing the domain registration length on a domain has no known boost to DA or any other ranking metric.

I suspect the rumor was creating by a domain registrar seeking to increase sales. The idea makes sense, but it has never been supported by anyone. In fact, when directly asked the question Matt Cutts denied it had value. He even went so far as to speculate the concept was probably a misunderstanding based on a patent Google filed to consider a domain's past registration length as a ranking factor. In other words, sites which have been around for years could potentially be given a boost over newer sites. Even that aspect was denied by Matt who shared Google files many patents but does not necessarily use them, or may have used them at one time but stopped.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1_1NQWQJ2Q&NR=1

Another point is a site's DA as reporting in the MOZbar or OSE is based on the Linkscape crawl of the web. A domain's registration length is definitely not part of the equation.

I hope this doesn't dissuade you from sharing your thoughts in the future. Welcome to MOZ.

[trickyzoo]

Can I post the actual URL or is that against seomoz rules? I rank well, but need an extra boost to get over the hump! How much would a great infographic cost? Do truste, BBB and verisign Help with seo by just having them on the site?

[RyanKent]

Can I post the actual URL or is that against seomoz rules?

You can post the URL

How much would a great infographic cost?

The question is too generic. It is like asking how much a logo costs. There are free logo makers, some $50 logo makers, and custom logo designs which cost thousands of dollars. A good infographic will be hundreds of dollars. A "great" one should still be do-able in the hundreds range, but it depends on the designer.

Do truste, BBB and verisign Help with seo by just having them on the site?

Definitely. They have been proven to help with conversion rates. Prior to panda they didn't have a direct ranking value, but I strongly believe they are a ranking factor in our post-panda world.

[trickyzoo]

Thanks for all the information.

[blake-76624]

Thanks for the correction and for the info!  I'll be careful what I say on here unless I know for sure what I am talking about!  Thanks again, Ryan

[RyanKent]

I love the site concept. Everyone needs insurance so your market is huge. It is amongst the most competitive markets on the internet so it's definitely a challenge.

I will send you a private message as there is too much to cover in a Q&A response.

[ShaMenz]

Hi trickyzoo,

Awesome information from Ryan on this one!

Given your industry, and the fact that you do have some budget, one other thing that could make a big impact for traffic, links, brand visibility and in the long run, overall authority of the site is the development of a phone app that people can't bear to be without

Hope that helps,

Sha

[blackrino]

Ryan, as I agree with you that it's not a huge factor - if a factor at all, registering your domain for longer than a year has been proven to actually help. The reason is because google doesn't think you are a spam site. If you have a site that has no past and you come and register for a year only, google will look at that as a spammy site. Now if you have had 10 years and you register for a year it's not as big as a deal (as you said). So I think it depends on what your circumstances are.

[RyanKent]

registering your domain for longer than a year has been proven to actually help.

If you have a site that has no past and you come and register for a year only, google will look at that as a spammy site.

Would you mind sharing the proof? All the "evidence" I have seen has been shoddy and thoroughly debunked. I am not aware of any SEO who has shared any credible evidence on this topic in the past 2 years.

When I began learning SEO I learned a lot of misinformation. Part of why I participate so heavily in SEOmoz Q&A is it constantly leads me to question my knowledge. If you have another quality source of information, I'd love the opportunity to learn more on this topic.

[RobertFisher]

I have to agree with Ryan. When we are doing campaigns it is not unusual for us to buy all the domain extensions to given phrases. An example would be if we were doing a medical device ad for PI attorneys, we might by BadDevice.org, .com, .net, .info, etc. We will only choose one or two so we do not want to have a bunch with two years we have wasted money on. We let the others expire.

We have had no problem growing PA and DA along with ranking on the engines with one year domains.I do not see where those we bought for two years improve ranking any faster, either.

[slobodannn]

Heloo, i'am new on seo and i have 1 blog hosted on blogspot.

Few 2 weeks i host my blog (unlock-all-phone.blogspot.com) to domain (http://unlockboot.com/).

My page rank on *blogspot is 1, but on the new domain is 0

Any solutions?