What qualifies as a authoritative domain?

[activitysuper]

As SEOMOZ ranks Authority through percentage, at what percentage does a domain become authoritative?

I'm looking for guest blogs/websites, which have a authoritative root domain to try and help increase our own auth and in turn rankings.

So far I have found a few guest blogs, which have around 40-50% but I kind of think I need to find ones which are more like 70-80% for this to really work.

Cheers

[Dan-Petrovic]

We do a fair amount of guest blogging at the moment and try to find websites which are as closely related to the industry. Authority is a secondary concern and only helps in sorting and prioritising of already found opportunities. There are other factors such as traffic, social reactions and citations of the content you publish. However if we stick just to authority (since that was your question) I personally treat it on a sliding scale. A 40% as you say may be authority in one industry and 80% may not be enough in other. Compare: stamp collecting hobby websites against nuclear physics research labs.

[activitysuper]

Ok,

Guest Blogging is new to me so let open this up a bit for me to learn

What are the benefits of guest blogging? Every SEO I have spoken to have said its like gold dust.

You say you guest blog on the most relevant websites possible with auth coming in 2nd, are you doing this because you are trying to target the most relevant audience possible or because you believe relevance of the website is more important then auth when it comes to ranking?

[RyanKent]

The advantage of guest blogging is you are exposing your site to an established audience.

If you take any given topic there are going to be power users who have may receive RSS feeds from all authoritative sources and visit many sites; however, most people will have one or two favorite sites and stick with them. By adding an occasional guest blog to a site, you are presenting yourself to the site's audience. Those who find your article helpful or interesting may follow a link back to your site. That is what I consider to be the primary advantage of guest blogging. If that link is followed, then you have also diversified your link portfolio a bit as well.