How do you raise domain authority?

[DustinAB]

Hey guys, hoping you can help me out here. I've been tasked with raising several sites' domain authority to a level of 30. Right now, many of them are hovering around 20. Three weeks into this project and our numbers have dropped 1-2 points on average but I don't think our efforts would reflect that this quickly.

From what I've read online, a good strategy is guest posting on relevant sites and collecting links from sites with higher DAs. I've also read at least one Moz article about this potentially being ineffective.

I've read some of the related posts but they seem mostly dated and the answers didn't seem to help me. Hoping someone with some experience with this can help me out, I appreciate it.

[crackingmedia]

Hi Dustin

You don't say what you have been doing to raise domain authority for these sites. I assume you are referring to Moz's Domain Authority metric.

Moz states: "Domain Authority is Moz's calculated metric for how well a given domain is likely to rank in Google's search results. It is based off data from the Mozscape web index and includes link counts, MozRank and MozTrust scores, and dozens of other factors. It uses a machine learning model to predictively find an algorithm that best correlates with rankings across thousands of search results that we predict against."

Whilst links to your sites will have an effect in raising domain authority providing the linking sites themselves are trusted, the single most important factor in improving the authority of a domain in my opinion is to build quality content on the domain site itself.

With search changing then the measurement of a domain's authority is also likely to change. As Moz states in the first sentence above: _"Domain Authority is Moz's calculated metric for how well a given domain is likely to rank in Google's search results." _ By increasing the quality of content on a site by creating content that answers the intent of people's searches it will mean that pages on that domain are more likely to rank well in Google's search results.

I am not saying offsite optimisation is no longer important but growing the authority of a domain has to start with what you do on the domain's site.

I hope that helps,
Peter

[DustinAB]

Thanks, Peter. I appreciate your response.

Ultimately we've done very little to raise our site DA's in the past outside of writing content centered around popular keywords. Only in the last three weeks I launched a guest posting campaign, targeting relevant sites with a higher DA than our own. From my understanding, this is a relatively safe way to force the issue provided you're providing sites with good content.

Over the past two months I've seen many of our sites decline in DA by about 4-5 points. Not sure if we've been doing anything to directly cause this, I've heard it could just be a change to the Moz algorithm. I've noticed competing sites have also declined in recent weeks.

[MattRoney]

Hi Dustin,

You're right—in general, a drop in DA that corresponds with a drop in your competitors' DA is most likely due to changes in the Mozscape index (though not the algorithm so much). It's best to look at DA less as an absolute value than as a benchmark against the competitors in your space.

Matt