Domain Authority - quality scoring

[Stephan_Boehringer]

Hey All:
Got a question about domain authority value.  I'm reviewing our link profile and I'm trying to figure out if there are any links to our domain we should disavow.  I'm also looking at some of our competitor link profiles to see if we are missing out on any quality websites that could be linking to us.  To evaluate this, I'm looking at the domain authoriy of any of the websites in question.  Thus, my question is two-fold.

1. At what point in time is Domain authority too low, necessitating us to get rid of the inbound link?2) How high should a DA value be to have us try to build an inbound link from to our website?

FYI: our website home page has a page authority of 49 and a domain authority of 43.

Thanks for your help

Stephan

[Chris.Menke]

Stephan,

It's hard to go strictly by the numbers, as some worthwhile niche sites may never develop great amounts of domain authority.  Your best bet is to go to the sites and check them out.  It doesn't take much to get a feel for whether its a real site that's up to date with real information that is useful to your visitors and theirs. Look at the home page, look at the page with the link, look at their back links, look at the pages that show up the top of a site:domain search, and make sure the homepage show up in the search results for a selected quote from it.  It's a very touchy-feely process.

[EGOL]

1) At what point in time is Domain authority too low, necessitating us to get rid of the inbound link?

Tiny acorns grow into mighty oak trees.

Keep in mind that domain authority is not an accurate measure of quality or potential.

If the Pope launches a new site would you "get rid of a link" from it while its domain authority is less than 10?

2) How high should a DA value be to have us try to build an inbound link from to our website?

Take the energy that you are putting into links and put it into creating content that people will want to share with one another.    If you can do that then all of your effort will go into producing assets for your website... and the people who see it will spread the word for you.

[toddmumford]

I would recommend basing disavows / removals on:

1. Relevancy of Linking Website
2. Paid Link Assessment (How does the website tend to link to external websites?)
3. Social Engagement of Linking Website
4. Overall Content Quality Assessment
5. Inbound Link Assessment (if necessary)
6. Domain Authority

This way, as both Chris and Egol mentioned, you probably will not run into the risk of removing a link that could grow to be powerful down the road.

Low authority links from highly relevant websites where the link is natural (editorial in nature) and in content that is high quality are perfectly find (and good)

Hope this Helps,
Todd

[DougRoberts]

Hi Stephen,

Do you believe your ranking is being affected by spammy/low quality or artificial links? Are you jumping on the disavow tool for a reason or is this a pre-emptive measure? Have you considered or tried to get any links that you are concerned about removed manually?

Google recommend that you use the Disavow tool only if:

1. your believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site

2. your confident that your site's performance in the search results is being harmed

DA alone isn't going to tell you which sites are spammy, artificial or low-quality. As Chris mentioned you'll need to take a broader view and look at the linking pages, their link profiles, the anchor text they're using their relevance to your site. (If someone said, hey I saw your link on site x, how would you feel about that?)

A link doesn't just provide authority, but also relevance, both in it's anchor text and context. You'll need to look at how natural these are, not over-optimised exact match/site wide/keyword anchor text and from a legitimate site as far as Google and your customer/audience are going to interpret it.

Just because a site has low DA, doesn't mean it's a bad place to get a link from! Some markets/niches are very small. Sites in that niche may be likely to have few links BUT they attract a highly relevant audience. While a link from one of these sites may do little to boost your domain authority it may give you some great exposure and drive a small amount of highly relevant (or high intent) visits to your site.

Make sure you know which links are passing you traffic. After all, we're not really here just for the rankings, it's the traffic we're after. You don't want sever the link that's passing high value visitors/customers.

Look at the back link profiles of your competitors (not just one or two) to get a feel for what is natural in your market/niche. Don't just look at the top ranking sites though as this can give you a skewed impression. Look at those businesses that are (respected) business competitors - not just the ones that are competing at the top of the SERPs.

As EGOL says, build great content (or offerings) and if you're going to build links do it to promote your content to your target audience.

You might also find this article on Link Profiling of interest:

Link Profile Tool to Discover Paid Links or Other Anomalous Linking Activity

And one final point - Domain Authority is just a Moz metric, it's only ever going to be an estimate how Google views the "link equity" of a site.

[Stephan_Boehringer]

Thanks for all the feedback guys.  Our site actually climbed in rankings over the last month for the core keywords we are trying to optimize.  We'll continue to build great content.

thanks for everything