How to increase your website's domain authority
Increase the session time of your website
The increase in access time to your site and the bounce rate reduction can help you quickly increase the authority of your site.
What is wait time?
Wait time is an important web page optimization metric that calculates the waiting time for your website:
- User engagement
- Session length (or bounce rate) and
- Click-through rate (of your search results)
The more people who spend time on your site reading a page (article, infographic, or video), the better the ranking of that page will be.
Stay time simply means how long your blog visitors stay on your site without pressing the back button. Google places more importance on sites that have a better stay time, so your domain authority also increases if you focus on improving your stay time.
Here are some effective tips you can use to increase the time it takes to visit your websites:
- Start creating blog posts that are over 2000 words long
- Show related posts under each blog post
- Interconnect regularly and do it wisely.
- Open external links in new tabs
Now let's talk about them in detail.
1. Start creating blog posts that are over 2000 words long
Short content has been dead for a long time. If you want to compete with others, start creating blog posts that are over 2,000 words long. Long articles generate quality traffic and more leads. Google always favors detailed and long content.
If you want to be ranked in the top 10 organic positions on Google, your blog post should contain at least 2,000 words. Creating such long content takes time, but it attracts backlinks and organic traffic.
An analysis carried out by Buzzsumo on 100 million articles revealed that in-depth articles were the most shared on social media. Longer articles get more engagement on social media
- Find ideas for permanent content and use Google trends to find hot topics. Write about how-to guides, frequently asked questions in your niche.
- Gather data and conduct scientific studies. Do thorough research before writing long content.
- Create a solid structure and present your ideas.
- Once you've structured the ideas, start writing.
- Use the Pomodoro technique to avoid distractions while writing.
- When writing, break long paragraphs into 2 or 3 sentences.
- Check for grammatical and spelling mistakes before publishing.
2. Show related items under each item:
To increase the number of page views and reduce the bounce rate, you need to make sure that users don't leave your blog after reading the first article. So what can you do?
Show related items under each item. For this, there are several plugins in WordPress.
- Another related posts plugin. It is one of the most popular WordPress related post plugins that takes care of both the display of text and the thumbnails of related posts.
- Contextual related posts: This plugin attempts to improve relevance by matching posts contextually. It displays related articles as thumbnails and text.
- Related posts for Wordpress : This is a lightweight alternative to the more popular related posts plugin that uses the cache to display related posts. It's faster and doesn't slow down your website.
- Intelly related post: It is quite different from other plugins because instead of displaying related articles below the content, it displays them inside your blog posts. It is generally used by news sites and blogs.
The best way to keep your blog visitors for a long time on your blog is to show related posts at the end of each blog post. So start installing one of the plugins shown above and check the results for yourself.
3. Create links to your old posts
Interlinking is nothing more than creating links to your old blog posts. To build links, focus on targeting the right keywords. If you do it the right way, you can generate massive traffic to your blog.
What can interconnection do?
- Get more organic search traffic.
- It allows you to obtain a better ranking for the desired keywords.
- It increases the number of page views.
- Pages that are linked more often get high domain authority.
- It helps the search engine to crawl each page.
To automatically interconnect your articles, here are the WordPress plugins
- SEO Automatic Links: It automatically creates links to your other articles. You can define words like “blogging tips” that need to be linked to specific articles. It is not only linked to articles already written but also to future articles.
- Mentionable : It adds internal links to your blog posts. You can set it up to show suggestions for your pages.
4. Open external links in new tabs:
Opening external links in new tabs reduces the bounce rate. Indeed, if they go down a rabbit hole, your blog site will be there, in a separate tab, waiting for them. If you are a Wordpress user, you can use the plugin External Links in New Window.
Be sure to reduce your website's bounce rate in order to increase your site's domain authority. The bounce rate is also known as the exit rate, a factor that intervenes in the behavior of users of your website.
If a person leaves your website without clicking on another page (that is, on their first visit), this is called a bounce rate. The lower the bounce rate or the exit rate of your site, the better you can increase your SEO and therefore your overall domain authority.
Be smart with external links
Your external links and your backlink profile play a VITAL role in improving your domain authority. Take a look at the image below to understand the importance of backlinks when it comes to boosting your domain authority.
Here's another important thing to consider. If you give too many links to others from your site without acquiring new backlinks, it is very difficult to increase the domain authority of your sites. So be smart when creating links to other sites, references, or web pages.
In general, you can use the rel="nofollow” tag when you link to
- Plugins
- Tools
- Affiliate products
- Social media platforms
- Software
- Reviews, etc.
A new DA from Moz is coming soon
Russ Jones, Principal Search Scientist at Moz, recently announced the introduction of a new domain authority algorithm.
Moz is working to provide a better, more relevant domain authority metric that eliminates spam, improves correlations, and most importantly, updates domain authority based on any changes Google makes.
After the new DA is released, your website's DA may fluctuate. We can't tell if DA changes are going to fluctuate significantly or not. So let's wait for the new Moz DA update.
So when will the new DA update happen?
To be specific, on March 5, 2019, you'll be able to get the latest DA updates.
You can check your own site as well as the DA of your competitor's site to see how relevant and effective the new Moz DA change is.
Don't worry about new DA index changes if your site's DA ranking falls, as this isn't a legitimate or accurate search metric that doesn't determine your Google ranking.
Use the 3 link building tactics
1. Guest blogs
Guest blogging always works like a charm in link building. But most bloggers fail to do good guest blogging because it requires time, dedication, effort, and a few strategies.
Here are the strategies to follow when practicing guest blogging:
- Only write to sites that are authoritative in your niche. Strive to write exceptional content for these sites.
- Use guest articles to expand your email address list. To create a list of email addresses, you can use Leadpages to create landing pages.
- Get in touch with the blog owner before you even get started on the topic. To do this, comment on his blog articles, respond to his statuses on social networks, etc.
- Once you've written for them, promote your guest post as your post.
- Write inspirational articles or articles with leading bloggers for immediate success.
2. Infographics
People love infographics. These are the most shared and the most appreciated contents on the web. Infographics can turn boring data into an interesting article. Visual articles Gain more backlinks only textual content.
To create an original and unique infographic:
- Find the right information before you create it.
- Know who your audience is
- Once you've determined your core message, develop a compelling story to engage readers.
- Design your infographic.
Promote it on all social media platforms.
3. Organize competitions to create links
Backlinks are extremely important for SEO. Most bloggers don't give backlinks just like that. So how?
Competitions. Yes, it's a marketing tool that increases brand exposure, awareness, and quick sales.
There are 3 types of competitions:
- Gifts : Who doesn't like to have something offered for free? This approach is ideal if you want to attract bloggers and influencers to spread information about them.
- Product promotions : They work like giveaways but are more focused on the product than on the brand. If you want to bring a new product or service to the market, this is the best approach. The price is the product itself, which attracts visitors. It attracts bloggers and helps generate links in this process.
- Discount codes : If you want to target a specific audience, these are ideal contests. They are given out as a reward for participating in a survey.
Remove toxic backlinks
When Google launched the Pinguin 2.0 update in 2013, all of a sudden, most sites experienced a drop in their PageRank. This is due to toxic backlinks. Previously, this had little effect, but now it's hurting your site.
What are toxic backlinks?
Backlinks are what hinder the SEO of your website. For example, paid links, links from link systems, links from gaming sites, or payday loans are considered toxic.
Why remove toxic backlinks?
If Google finds that your blog has a significant number of toxic backlinks, it reduces the DA of your site and it is likely to exclude it from its database.
If you notice a sudden drop in traffic and if you get a warning notification from Google, that means your blog has toxic backlinks.
If you get links from sites that are not indexed by Google, from sites that have lower domain authority, from sites with very low traffic, from sites with an unusual number of external links, you should remove these backlinks.
Here's how you can remove toxic backlinks:
- Contact the site owners and ask them to remove your links.
- Use Google's disavow tool to remove toxic backlinks.
- If your site is new and has very little traffic but more toxic backlinks, it's best to delete it.
Once you've removed toxic backlinks, file a reconsideration request with Google. Make a humble request and describe the steps you took to correct the problem. If you want to rank highly, you need to take removing toxic backlinks seriously.
You can also use Google's disavowlinks feature to remove toxic links from your sites.
Verify and recover Google penalties
Every blogger wants to increase blog traffic and rank high in the top 10 search results. The success of your business depends entirely on these two aspects.
And yes, a small drop in traffic has an impact on Google rankings. In this case, there are chances that your blog has been hit by a Google penalty.
Sometimes Google removes the blog link from its search database and, in the worst case, it also bans it. This is therefore a very serious issue and appropriate measures must be taken to prevent your site from being penalized.
How do you identify a Google penalty?
Keep an eye on your website ranking. Yes, it is a very important step. If you don't monitor it, you won't be able to spot Google penalties. Trust me, it's not a time-consuming process at all. You can use tools for that.
- Google Analytics: It helps you know the overall health of your site and you can track changes in organic traffic. This tool interacts with many other SEO tools available online. Besides tracking your site traffic, you can also check the ranking status.
- Google Search Console : It's also a free tool for monitoring your website traffic.
- Moz Rank Tracker : It's not a free tool but once you become a pro-underwriter, it offers valuable SEO tools. If your site is penalized by Google, you can get it back using its 30-day free trial.
- Search metrics : It gives you a clear idea of what really happened on your blog and how to fix it.
- Seositecheckup.com : It offers a large number of SEO tools to monitor your website. You can use these tools to check numerous On-Page factors, unwanted links, and much more.
Google penalty types
In the process of identifying Google penalties, it's good to also know the types of penalties. Here are the 2 types of Google penalties:
- Algorithmic penalty : This happens when there is a change in Google's algorithm. Each time they update the algorithm, the changes are visible. So always check Major updates.
- Penalty for manual review : These penalties start with a triggered algorithmic penalty. If you are affected by this penalty, you will receive an email in your Google Search Console account. Simply log in to your Google webmaster tool account and in the “Security and Manual Actions” section, select “Manual Actions”. If no penalty is applied to your blog, you will see the message “No problems detected” appear.
How do I recover from a Google penalty?
Poor quality backlinks heavily penalize your site. They can damage your site irretrievably.
To avoid these bad backlinks, avoid getting links from the following sites:
- Sites that are banned by Google
- Sites with duplicate content.
- Sites that are not related to your niche.
- Sites with low content.
- Gaming sites
95% of the penalties imposed by Google are related to the site's backlinks. So identify the backlinks that cause a drop in your rankings.
Here's how you can identify bad backlinks:
Go to Google Search Console, click on “search traffic” and select “links to your site.” From this “who links the most” module, click on “more” to see all backlinks.
To export all of your backlinks, click on “Download the latest links.” Now import all of these backlinks into your SEO tool and remove these links. You can use theMonitor backlinks tool.
Once you've identified the bad backlinks, make a request to remove those links.
Create an email with a request to remove a link.
Once you send the email, there are 3 possible scenarios that can occur.
- Either your link will be removed or
- Your email will be ignored or
- The site owner may ask for money to remove your link. In this case, it is enough to disavow the domain.
In the Monitor Backlinks tool, go to “filters,” click “Tags,” and select “disavow.” From there, you can easily create a disavow report.
Once you are ready with the disavow report. Upload your file to Google Disavow and it takes 2-4 weeks to process your request. Once done, you'll see the change in your rankings.
Maintaining a user-friendly website
If your website is difficult to navigate, the user is extremely frustrated. And it is very likely that he will not return. It is therefore very important to create a user-friendly website if you are serious about your business.
- Guide visitors to a specific path on your site. Make sure visitors know where they are and where they need to go. You can use “Call-To-Action” for this purpose.
- Don't use jargon in your content. Keep it simple and easy to understand.
- Add search functionality to your site. It allows your visitors to easily find the information they want.
- Highlight keywords and boldface or underline specific texts to allow visitors to better understand.
- Place your navigation either on the left or at the top of your site. That way, they will be able to see the options for navigating your site.
Once you've made these changes, be sure to test your website.
Create a white hat SEO strategy
The implementation of a white hat SEO strategy is nothing more than getting natural backlinks to your blog. If a high number of pages linked to your blog are relevant to your niche, then Google likes to rank your site higher in its rankings.
How do you get natural backlinks?
- Content is king. Write great content that is not easy to find on other websites. You can write controversial topics, case studies, facts, and figures.
- Participate in forums and events related to your niche and connect with other bloggers.
- Almost all social networking sites allow you to put links in the Bio section. This has great value when it comes to SERPs.
- Building relationships with other bloggers in your niche allows you to get natural backlinks. Comment on their articles to get their attention.
- If you have good programming skills or are familiar with HTML, create tools that help users. This will allow you to get huge backlinks.
- Check the broken links and replace your link if you have a similar type of content.
- Write genuine guest articles on authoritative sites in your field and add a link to your site.
- Repost viral articles and link to the original source. It is possible that most blogs refer to your blog by quoting it.
Always remember that quality backlinks help to get quality traffic and get better rankings very quickly for any website, whether old or new.
Alternatives to Moz Domain Authority
Before we talk about other alternatives to Moz DA, let's first talk briefly about how AD works.
This is how the DA (Domain Authority) works.
Domain Authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts the ranking of a website in search engines. It calculates this measure by combining all link measures into a single score such as
- Linking root domains
- Total number of links
- MozRank
- MozTrust
It evaluates the authority of the domain on a logarithmic scale of 100 points.
The higher the score, the higher the quality of the domain and the more suitable it is to submit our backlinks. A score greater than 50 is recommended if you want to rank faster for most keywords in Google search results. If you have a DA of over 70, you can easily rank for even competitive keywords.
We all know how popular Moz Domain Authority is, but if you're looking for other alternatives to Moz DA, here are a few.
Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR)
Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) is just as popular and gives you an overview of high-authority domains. You can easily determine the level of authority of a site or domain by checking the DR developed by Ahrefs.
There is a huge difference between the measurements of two widely used SEO tools, Moz and Ahrefs.
Like Moz DA, Domain Rating (DR) is also measured on a logarithmic scale of 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest.
According to Ahrefs, the “logarithmic scale” means that the gap between the 77—78 DRs is much larger than that between the 27—28 DRs. It just means that the higher your DR is, the more difficult it will be to increase it by a few more points.
Here's how Ahrefs calculates the DR for a given website.
- See how many unique domains have at least one dofollow link to the target website.
- Take into account the DR values of the link domains.
- Consider the number of unique domains that each of these websites links to.
- Plot these scores on a 0-100 scale
The interesting thing about DR is that if a high DR website links to thousands of other sites, Ahrefs places less value on these links. On the other hand, if a website with a low DR links to only a few sites, Ahrefs considers these links to be powerful, allowing you to get a higher DR for your domain.
Nowadays, SEO experts and professional bloggers rely more on DR than on DA. Now we just have to wait for the new DA update from the Moz team to see what metric is really effective in determining the authority of a site or domain.
Spam score checker
Moz has an amazing tool called Spam Score, which shows you which inbound links to your site are causing problems, making it easy for you to contact them or disavow them entirely.
A spam score is an evaluation with values ranging from 1 to 10, with 1 being the best spam score and 10 the lowest.
It determines the number of spam links in a website. Google downgrades websites that contain spam messages and links. The spam score checker will help us avoid building links in such websites.
SEMrush Authority Score and Trust Score
The authority score is the measure composed of the SEMrush tool that assesses the overall quality of a domain.
The score uses the following SEMrush data.
- Backlink data including domain score
- Trust Score, reference domains, follow and nofollow links.
- Organic search data, including traffic and organic search positions
- Website traffic data
Trust Score is another incredible alternative to Moz DA that essentially measures the trustworthiness of a web page or domain based on the number of links from highly trusted websites.
The Trust Score (TS) of your website depends mainly on the quality of your backlink profile. So the more quality and high authority links your domain has, the higher your TS will be.
Note: Be sure to install SeoQuake which is a free plugin for your browser that provides you with organic search data in a single click. Currently compatible with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera.
You'll get organic search data as well as other useful tools, including an SEO audit, a keyword density report, internal/external link analysis, and even social metrics.
What to do when your website's DA decreases?
One of the most common questions is, “What should I do if my site's DA domain authority declines?”
There are so many cases of sites that go from having a DA of 50 to 10 or even less in a few months and there are also cases where sites with a low DA (below) get #1 rankings on Google.
So what can you take away from it?
DA has nothing to do with your search engine rankings. It just means that instead of worrying about why your site's popularity index has fallen, focus more on how to properly optimize your content for your target keywords and attract relevant links. That way, you can improve your search engine rankings.
That said, there's another question that most people ask: “What is a good DA and PA?”
There's no rule of thumb for how many DAs or APs a site should have, but if you prefer to have a DA over 65, you tend to rank well for most of the keywords you're targeting.
That said, page authority (PA) measures the ranking strength of a single page on a website, while domain authority (DA) measures the total strength of the website's pages, domain, and subdomain. The average DA is 30. To rank highly, your page and domain authority should be over 30.
Can you outperform your competitors if they have a better DA or PA?
Yes, you absolutely can. The DA of your competitors doesn't matter. By focusing on “long-tail keywords” that have lower search volume, you can easily beat your competitors, even if you have a brand new site with less DA.
To be able to outperform your competitors, you need to have a solid content marketing strategy in place. You can also use tools like SEMrush to spy on their keywords and backlink sources.
FAQs
Here are some interesting questions about how to increase domain authority and beyond that you may find useful.
How do I check domain authority?
While there are a ton of free tools online that you can use to check the domain authority of any site, the best and easiest way to find the exact DA is to install MozBar. It is a free browser extension that shows you the domain authority of any site when you visit it.
How is domain authority calculated?
Domain authority (DA) is calculated by evaluating several factors, including link root domains and the total number of links, to obtain a unique DA score.
The DA is a statistical number between 0 and 100, developed by Moz to determine how a domain (and its subdomains) will rank in Google search engine results.
How do I increase my domain authority?
There are two best ways to increase your site's DA.
- Earning high-quality links (you can use tactics like publishing guest posts, raising blogger awareness, building broken links, etc.)
- Remove bad links (use tools like SEMrush and the Google Disavow tool to easily find and remove all toxic links from your sites).
Summary.
Your backlink profile, content quality, and user experience - all of these factors come into play in increasing a website's domain authority.
So be sure to focus on removing toxic links and try to acquire as many quality links as possible using guest posting, email outreach, Skyscraper technique, etc.
What do you think of the guide “How to increase domain authority”? Did you find it useful? Do you have other tips or techniques for increasing a site's domain authority ?
