Everything about domain authority in SEO

What is domain authority?

Basically, it's about assigning a numerical value to the relevance that a domain or web page has. This authority can be put into context by comparing it with all the other websites in the world. Although, to be fair, what's really interesting is being the page with the highest authority or popularity in your specific sector.

How is domain authority measured?

Domain authority has traditionally been linked to the incoming link profile of the site. Generally, a domain's relevance is determined by the number of external links that point to its web page.

To put it very simply, you could say that the greater the number of links, the greater the domain authority. It's another thing whether that authority is actually useful to us, as we'll explain later on...

Domain authority vs page authority

Within web authority, we need to distinguish between two types:

• ›Domain authority: this measures the authority of the site as a whole. To do so, it takes into account all the links pointing to the website.
• ›Page authority: this is the authority that a specific URL has, in isolation from the rest of the website.

[caption id="attachment_14926" align="aligncenter" width="1061"]

Ahrefs URL and page authority values for one of our articles. In this example, our article on "Types of domains" has a page authority of 8 and a domain authority of 22.[/caption]

Google's PageRank

As we stated at the beginning of the article, it all started with Google's PageRank. But what is PageRank?

It's one of Google's algorithms. In this case, it was registered and launched in January 1999 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The purpose of PageRank was to measure the authority and quality of the various web pages indexed by Google. To do this, they assigned values on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 10, calculating, among other things, values based on a system of citations or links.

The metric could be consulted at any time and had considerable relevance among SEOs and companies that hired web positioning services.

This gave rise to:

• ›spam links
• ›link farms and
• ›other techniques carried out with the aim of boosting PageRank.

Google announced in 2003 that it was no longer updating its PageRank index, although they have acknowledged that they still use it internally.

Want to learn more about PageRank? You can read the Abstract published by Google's founders about this metric.

MOZ's Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a web authority ranking system developed by Moz, SEOMoz at the time. DA predicts the likelihood of a website ranking higher in the SERPs. The Domain Authority score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher-scoring pages considered better.

Similarly, there's PA, or Page Authority, which measures this authority at the URL level.

For years, these metrics have been taken as the holy grail by some. The truth is that they are very useful for getting an idea of the state of a domain or page compared to others, but that's where it ends. Increasing DA or PA doesn't mean improving rankings or doing better SEO. They themselves explain this in this video.

Other metrics to measure your site's authority

PageRank was the official metric, and DA and PA were the first ones created by a company outside Google and widely accepted, but after them came more ways of measuring a domain's authority.

Below we comment on some of them, although there are more.

Ahrefs' DR and UR

You surely know Ahrefs, a very useful tool for getting to know your link profile. Precisely thanks to this specialization in links, they launched their DR and UR metrics, based on the quality and quantity of links.

• ›Domain Rating or DR measures the authority of your domain based on the link profile detected and analyzed according to Ahrefs' parameters.
• ›URL Rating or UR shows the authority or relevance of a specific URL based on those same parameters.

Majestic SEO's TF and CF

Another well-known SEO tool specialized in links that has its own metrics, CF and TF. In this case, they have their own calculations to determine how authority is transferred from one domain to another, even when there are other domains in between. For example, they assign a value to a link that arrives at domain C from domain A, passing through domain B.

• ›Citation Flow or CF is the indicator that is based on the quantity of incoming links pointing to a domain or page within it.
• ›Trust Flow or TF is the metric that, for its part, refers to the quality of the links that the domain or URL receives.
• ›TF/CF Ratio is the proportion between quality and quantity of links. Getting close to 1 would be ideal, and being above 1 would be very good, but also very difficult.

Link Affinity's FuSEOn Rank

Link Affinity is the Spanish AI-based link building tool created by Sico de Andrés and his team. Does that ring a bell? No? Well, it should, because it's a great link prospecting software. ?

They have developed their own authority indicator, the FuSEOn Rank (FR), based on a mix of Majestic's Trust Flow and Ahrefs' DR. The higher the FR, the greater the authority the site will have. ?

How to improve page and domain authority

Your page's authority is improved with citations from other web pages with a certain authority and related topic. At SEO Alive, we use Link Affinity, among other strategies, to improve a site's authority and to have that reflected in its trustworthiness and rankings.

In the days of PageRank anything went, which led to multiple ways of mass linking without taking into account any other impact beyond improving that indicator. Fortunately, things have changed and now there are other differentiating factors such as the quality of the page linking to you, the depth of the URL citing you within the domain, the topical affinity between the sites, etc. It's a much more complex process based on quality far ahead of quantity.

And that's what you have to base your link building strategy and relationships on: quality. If your content attracts citations from authoritative sites with a strong affinity to your content, your authority will improve and, very likely, so will your rankings.

Conclusions and opinion

At SEO Alive, we know that all these metrics help you get an idea of the state of a site and, above all, to compare it with others under the same standards. But we're also aware that these metrics come from external companies, not from Google, and are based on the data they can extract, analyze and consider. Furthermore, many metrics can be manipulated, which means that, for example, a higher DA or PA doesn't entail greater real authority. For that reason, we encourage you to keep using them when comparing domain authority, but you should never take them as a rule or an absolute truth.?

Do you know more metrics to measure domain authority? Tell us which ones you know in the comments box. See you next time!