With Internet development, a website’s Authority is a compound metric used for measuring a domain or individual web page’s overall quality and SEO performance particularly against other websites within a similar realm. The score is based upon many metrics representing authority within the field and trustworthiness. Machine Learning (ML) ensures the result is fresh so do not expect to get 100 – it’s a moving target for you to continuously improve and attempt to remain in the top quartile.

The old days of recent, relevant and frequent posts that determined your website’s position in the major search engines list of results has been replaced by a more sophisticated approach. None of the engines officially publish how they rank your site but it is generally accepted the following is instrumental.

Initially an algorithm uses organic search data, web traffic, and back link information to understand the ranking of the most trusted domains on the web. Then a second algorithm uses backlink data compares how your site wins or loses authority by gaining links. The number and own authority of referring domains. The volume of outbound links from referring domains. The total number of IPs and backlinks pointing to the site. Plus further esoteric information.

The measurement is within a range of 1 to 100 with very few domains scoring late nineties.

In my previous post ‘Discoverability’ I described tuning your website and good housekeeping before approaching other businesses within your realm to link to your site – and therefore positively affect your Domain Authority (DA) score. In this respect there is no ‘Good Score’. Obviously you don’t want to be zero and under fifty would highlight obvious improvements that need to be made, but whatever your score, even improving the content, SEO and backlinks for your site may not improve the score if ML comparison websites have also improved or further authoritative sites have been added to the subset and less authoritative dropped.

I’ve mentioned before in Social Selling posts that ‘niching down on a niche’ is the way forward for marketing SME sized companies online in highly competitive fields to become a trusted leader within that particular industry and this is relevant with DA. Ordinarily, you may think that linking to a blog or site with a lower score would be disadvantageous, but in fact, within a niche it could help your own DA. The important thing is to compare your DA with competitors to ensure that your SEO and recently published content is working and giving you a higher rank in search engine’s result lists.

In summary. If a domain score is upwards then a concerted effort with SEO may be yielding results. It may though be that a competitor has fallen back. You see, it’s not a simple yes or no. Heading downwards could indicate a very competitive niche, lack of effort with SEO.

Link building to sites that do not already link with you, listing on trusted directories, mentions in respected articles online (linked) and eradicating broken links or links to toxic sites will all improve your DA.

Astute use of keywords within your content, titles and tags are also a great way of positively influencing this.
 
An analogy may also be, you wouldn’t expect to run a takeaway food business of the scale of MacDonald’s, Burger King or KFC, but you could aim to be the ‘best of the rest’ more achievable and far less frustrating!