Domain Authority - quality scoring
-
Hey All:
Got a question about domain authority value. I'm reviewing our link profile and I'm trying to figure out if there are any links to our domain we should disavow. I'm also looking at some of our competitor link profiles to see if we are missing out on any quality websites that could be linking to us. To evaluate this, I'm looking at the domain authoriy of any of the websites in question. Thus, my question is two-fold.- At what point in time is Domain authority too low, necessitating us to get rid of the inbound link?2) How high should a DA value be to have us try to build an inbound link from to our website?
FYI: our website home page has a page authority of 49 and a domain authority of 43.
Thanks for your help
Stephan
-
Thanks for all the feedback guys. Our site actually climbed in rankings over the last month for the core keywords we are trying to optimize. We'll continue to build great content.
thanks for everything
-
Hi Stephen,
Do you believe your ranking is being affected by spammy/low quality or artificial links? Are you jumping on the disavow tool for a reason or is this a pre-emptive measure? Have you considered or tried to get any links that you are concerned about removed manually?
Google recommend that you use the Disavow tool only if:
1. your believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site
2. your confident that your site's performance in the search results is being harmed
DA alone isn't going to tell you which sites are spammy, artificial or low-quality. As Chris mentioned you'll need to take a broader view and look at the linking pages, their link profiles, the anchor text they're using their relevance to your site. (If someone said, hey I saw your link on site x, how would you feel about that?)
A link doesn't just provide authority, but also relevance, both in it's anchor text and context. You'll need to look at how natural these are, not over-optimised exact match/site wide/keyword anchor text and from a legitimate site as far as Google and your customer/audience are going to interpret it.
Just because a site has low DA, doesn't mean it's a bad place to get a link from! Some markets/niches are very small. Sites in that niche may be likely to have few links BUT they attract a highly relevant audience. While a link from one of these sites may do little to boost your domain authority it may give you some great exposure and drive a small amount of highly relevant (or high intent) visits to your site.
Make sure you know which links are passing you traffic. After all, we're not really here just for the rankings, it's the traffic we're after. You don't want sever the link that's passing high value visitors/customers.
Look at the back link profiles of your competitors (not just one or two) to get a feel for what is natural in your market/niche. Don't just look at the top ranking sites though as this can give you a skewed impression. Look at those businesses that are (respected) business competitors - not just the ones that are competing at the top of the SERPs.
As EGOL says, build great content (or offerings) and if you're going to build links do it to promote your content to your target audience.
You might also find this article on Link Profiling of interest:
Link Profile Tool to Discover Paid Links or Other Anomalous Linking Activity
And one final point - Domain Authority is just a Moz metric, it's only ever going to be an estimate how Google views the "link equity" of a site.
-
I would recommend basing disavows / removals on:
1. Relevancy of Linking Website
2. Paid Link Assessment (How does the website tend to link to external websites?)
3. Social Engagement of Linking Website
4. Overall Content Quality Assessment
5. Inbound Link Assessment (if necessary)
6. Domain AuthorityThis way, as both Chris and Egol mentioned, you probably will not run into the risk of removing a link that could grow to be powerful down the road.
Low authority links from highly relevant websites where the link is natural (editorial in nature) and in content that is high quality are perfectly find (and good)
Hope this Helps,
Todd -
1) At what point in time is Domain authority too low, necessitating us to get rid of the inbound link?
Tiny acorns grow into mighty oak trees.
Keep in mind that domain authority is not an accurate measure of quality or potential.
If the Pope launches a new site would you "get rid of a link" from it while its domain authority is less than 10?
2) How high should a DA value be to have us try to build an inbound link from to our website?
Take the energy that you are putting into links and put it into creating content that people will want to share with one another. If you can do that then all of your effort will go into producing assets for your website... and the people who see it will spread the word for you.
-
Stephan,
It's hard to go strictly by the numbers, as some worthwhile niche sites may never develop great amounts of domain authority. Your best bet is to go to the sites and check them out. It doesn't take much to get a feel for whether its a real site that's up to date with real information that is useful to your visitors and theirs. Look at the home page, look at the page with the link, look at their back links, look at the pages that show up the top of a site:domain search, and make sure the homepage show up in the search results for a selected quote from it. It's a very touchy-feely process.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Paid Subscription Directory with Low Moz Open Site Explorer Spam Score
Looking at different backlinks of my competitors and came across a few directories that require a 1 time payment for the year. Is this considered the same as paying for a link or would this be considered something like getting a listing on your local Chamber of Commerce site? Also, I put the site through Moz's Open Site Explorer and it had PA:22 and DA:20, which is nothing incredible, but also had a spam score of 2. So would a site like this hurt my rankings? I know that's a good spam score, so I am a little confused with what to do. Here is the site: http://scl-online.net/en.htm Thanks for any help! Love this site.
Link Building | | aua0 -
Having High Quality sites link to my site
How can I tell if a site is high quality or not, so far I have been using Moz's Toolbar to find the Domain Authority and Page authority to determine the quality of the site - is this correct?
Link Building | | VoodooCreativeLtd0 -
Use 301'd Domain for a new campaign
Hello everybody, My company is getting ready to start a new mediacampaign on a very specific subject. The mediacampaign is not directly targeted at our core business, the goal is more to inform our customers about a subject and do a little branding for our company. A nice (and expensive) infographic was built that is going to be the core content of the campaign. We want the infographic to get shared a lot and therefore some of my colleagues want the url to be as short as possible. The idea is to host the infographic on a url on our companysite, but use a 301'd, shorter domainname in our communications. We are going to be getting a lot of links to this empty 301'd domain which does nothing else then 301 to our companysite. I know that linkbuilding to a 301'd domain is an old blackhat tactic, that's the main reason I don't feel good about this. But i can't really find any info on this subject.
Link Building | | Laurensvda0 -
Link quality
Hi, Having read dozens of your blogs and found them highly informative, i have to ask a question. I am kicking oout our SEO company and have taken over the SEO myself with some excellent results. Our SEO providers tell me that links from any site (irrelevent of their DA) are good, providing they are comming from a relevant source. We are in the security industry and according to MOZ, we have a DA of 52. If i can get a link to our site from another company in our industry but they have a DA of 10, is this really beneficial for me? Info i have read in Moz blogs suggest it is n ot a good idea. Please help. many thanks Daddy Smurf
Link Building | | DaddySmurf0 -
Does the feature "Competitive Domain Analysis " include subdomains?
Hey guys, I have set our domain as www.domain.com at the campaign settings, but i'm not sure if the link analysis ("Competitive Domain Analysis") does include subdomains? Does anybody know this? Greez Chris
Link Building | | lordcyphon0 -
How important is the relevance of a link compared to its authority?
Would be interested on some perspectives on link relevancy versus page and domain authority in terms of importance for SERP. How important is the relevance of the site linking back compared to the page and domain authority of that site
Link Building | | casper4340 -
Hey guys wondering which is more important getting links from authority sites or relevant sites?
basically a site that has really high authority but not that relevant or medium authority pages but relevant. an example an authority site with a mozrank of 80 or a relevant site of 20.
Link Building | | shrikey0 -
The quality of links is measured by website relevancy to my business?
In Open Site Explorer links are being valued with Domain Authority and page Authority. My question is if you measure somehow the relevancy of the website with the business of the website to which the links are going? I have learned that an important part of the value of links is the relevancy of the website with my business. I am seeing for example a link from a children website to a car related website as very much valued. I dont see very much relevancy with both so I wonder you take this into account.
Link Building | | ceesie0