New Website & DA Score

[KevnJr]

We are preparing to build a new website for a branch of our company. According to Neil Patel (whom I highly respect) our DA should come in around 30 (categorizing us as a startup, see chart below).

So I ask: Why do our current sites DA Score below 30? (20 & 29 respectively)

Our sites were redesigned in 2013 and are responsive, pass the Google Mobile Friendly test and I've improved load speed by over 25% by compressing images.

I have used Moz as guidance for 10 months on both 7 + yo sites, HP.com is 14 yo, our pages score in the high 90's and I have disavowed bad backlinks for 6 months (now only every other month). I thought we would be in or close to the 50 range by 2017 after a solid year of improvements, but I don't see that happening. Our scores go up a point or two, then back down, we have floundered 2 points either way for 10 months.

Most important question: What do I do now to raise our DA?

Lastly, my plan is to take all the lessons learned from the past years and apply it to the new site, measure the success and then redesign the other two sites in accordance to the new model. But that may be a year away.

KJr

www.heritageprinting.com

www.heritageprintingcharlotte.com

| DA | Rating |
| 1-10 | Poor – Your site is young and weak. You have a lot of growing to do. |
| 11-20 | Decent. Your site isn’t stellar, but you’re doing better. It would be good to grow. |
| 21-30 | Fair. Your site shows signs of SEO, but there are many things you can and should do to improve. |
| 31-40 | Competitive. A lot of startups find themselves in this DA range. It’s not bad, and you’re beginning to get close to the sweet spot. |
| 41-50 | Good. Now, you’re getting somewhere. This is a nice place to be, and many good e-commerce sites find themselves squarely in this category. |
| 51-60 | Strong. As you swing out of the lower half of the scale, you’re beginning to get much healthier. This is a good place to be. |
| 61-70 | Excellent. A DA at this level represents a great site with a lot of recognition, a lot of link backs, and a considerable authority in its niche. Many .edus are in this space. |
| 71-80 | Outstanding. You’re dominating in the SERPs and owning your niche. Quick Sprout is a 73. |
| 81-90 | Very outstanding. You’re in the upper echelons of authority. You can consider yourself to have arrived. |
| 91-100 | Rare. These sites are household names — Wikipedia, Facebook, New York Times, etc. Your site will probably never attain this level. Only a miniscule fraction of a percentage of sites on the Internet ever get this high. |

https://www.quicksprout.com/2014/04/09/how-to-score-your-websites-seo-in-10-minutes-or-less/

[Deacyde]

While DA is important, I've seen more a correlation with DA and backlinks than I have DA and SEO. I have a site that I've increased the overall SEO by leaps and bounds, removing about 1,000 pages of junk products and useless content pages that could easily been merged into epic category content pages.

I mean I overhauled this site to the T. What did I see in the process? A loss in DA by about 15 points, in the end the culprit? Backlinks, in that time we had the EPA.gov remove a backlink while they redesigned the page themselves, as well lost a few other backlinks from directories that bit the dust and articles that either were removed or some other issue that resulted in backlink loss. Mind you, the SEO and even organic traffic increased in this time period alongside conversation rates.

I think DA might be going the same way pagerank went, since in SEO, there isn't one or even 2 issues that spell success, it's over 9,000.

I also feel, rankbrain will continue to make fools out of us all in the coming years, as it learns and enacts new practices through better optimization and user query intake.

[MattRoney]

Hi Kevin! I just want to confirm that DA is a link metric—it's almost entirely based on your backlink profile. The best way to bring it up is to build high-quality links.