Should I be Improving Domain Authority?
-
Hello
I work for a company that deals in Collectibles and runs a collectibles news service. In the UK our site ranks on the first page for the keyword "collectibles". We wish to strengthen this position and increase our rank on the US Google.
I'm going to be working on Keyword Optimisation for the site, to hopefully make many of our pages more relevant and improve the rank. However I feel we may be held back by our Domain Authority score. Our Google PageRank and MozRank are both low due to the fact we don't have a huge amount of external links to the site.
Is this something that will potentially hold us back? Should I be working on improving this as before the site optimisation?
We are well set up for a content based strategy due to "News" nature of the site. My ownly concern with link building is i've heard that it could potentially negatively effect us.
Or is the risk of link building only really associated with black hat methods?
One last thing. I've been using the Google keyword Tool to judge competition for specific search terms. Is this useful for organic search? Or is it only relevant for PPC?
Sorry to be a pain with all these question!
Thanks
-
No problem...
Installing a blog to your main site shouldn't be a problem really msot of the CMS out there tag on pretty easily.
This site is a great resource so come back often - Since my recent joining I think I have doubled my knowledge levels and still so much to learn,....
Best of luck with it -
Kieran
-
Thanks for the advice Kieran. I'll see what I can do about moving the blog onto the main site.
I just wish the site was more flexible!
-
_For link building, I was thinking along the lines of researching relevant sites, asking to be a guest blogger, or providing them with some unique content. _
This is a good tactci and looking at your site I am sure that you can provide this. It takes time and you have to put the miles in I think.
Currently i'm looking at improving the rank of our Investment Newsletter page. SEOMoz gives it a grade A in the on page optimisation tool. But we are only on page 3, where as two of our competitors are on page 1 with equal or lower grading.
So do you believe the main reason for this to be our lack of links?
The page grading tool is a Get the basics sorted out tool and I think personally it helps you focus on the message of the page. The next leve is to look at what is on the page. I often go back to pages (and do this nearly every day) and ask mysef was I drinking when I did a certain page.
I would seriously work at getting the blog back in the mains page as when you click away you are well... away..
-
Hello to both of you.
Thanks for your responses.
I'll make sure I now set Google Keywords Tool to Exact match, as I was previously using broad it is clear to see how far away the too statistics are.
In terms of generating our own news and information. We do try and do that as much as possible, we manage to get interviews, such as an interview with Tammy Allen, and Depeche Modes Alan Wilder. On certain occasions this is not possible, we can't visit all auctions etc. So we rely on other sources to get the best information possible.
We do have an investments page, with plenty of resources created by the company to help people make the best choices when it comes to their investments. But in some ways this may be slightly buried. We also started the blog as a new way of generating traffic, adding in more opinion, hopefully giving making things a bit more readbility.
For link building, I was thinking along the lines of researching relevant sites, asking to be a guest blogger, or providing them with some unique content. Or in some situations asking for a link if its appropriate. (We get plenty of link requests, so I know how not to do it!)
Currently i'm looking at improving the rank of our Investment Newsletter page. SEOMoz gives it a grade A in the on page optimisation tool. But we are only on page 3, where as two of our competitors are on page 1 with equal or lower grading.
So do you believe the main reason for this to be our lack of links?
If so how would you suggest encouraging links to an obscure page like "Investment Newsletter"?
Thanks Again
-
Hi Adrian
Well done on ranking for Collectibles in the UK it is a competitive space with lots of search – I didn’t see you at number one however so I would suggest you check with personalized search turned off.
**However I feel we may be held back by our Domain Authority score. **
Now you mention Domain Authority. Your domain authority is currently 32 so growth is of course Welcome. A lot of that comes with linking from high authority sites. Your site looks like is a powerful source of information on collectibles on first glance but on closer inspection it also looks like that a lot of it is curated news. I would think about developing your own news and information.
Your blog also is on the WordPress.com platform and is not self hosted. I would work to correct this and bring the blog back onto your local site as you are moving traffic off of your main site.
We are well set up for a content based strategy due to "News" nature of the site. My ownly concern with link building is i've heard that it could potentially negatively effect us.
I am not sure what you mean here. Lnk building is something you should be thinking of even through organically spreading good news and articles that people link to and share on the Net. If you produce an excellent article with an interesting slant on a collectible then it may get added juice and get links.
Or is the risk of link building only really associated with black hat methods?
Link building done well and professionally (as I with the ethics of a professional as opposed to paid) should be part of your marketing plan. Many companies now employ full time Internet marketing experts doing just this as part of their brief. Link building is not equal to black hat.
One last thing. I've been using the Google keyword Tool to judge competition for specific search terms. Is this useful for organic search? Or is it only relevant for PPC?
On accuracy of the Keyword tool irldonalb is right and the tool is inaccurate and should be used along with Insights and some of the tools here on SEOMOZ if you are a member. But it is still a good indicator and shows the level of activity.
It is relevant to both search and PPC. Google never claims for it to be 100% accurate either but it is used by most people these days as on of their go to tools for their keyword research.
Finally it IS worth while reading though here a bit (if you havent done so already for more ideas and tips for your SEO campaign. I visit it regularly and it is one of the best references.
-
Gear your website up onsite correctly first then begin link building so the site can absorb the link equity freely and correctly.
Blackhat methods are your only main concern and Blackhat methods and what to avoid are all over the web, if you just search on Google.
The keyword tool is pretty inaccurate, it can be an indication though, when using it make sure that "Exact" is ticked on the left hand side and not "Broad". I would recommend looking at Google Insights and Trends as well.
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
-
Domain authority of competitor went up drastically
Hello Moz community, I’m following one of my competitors on Moz, and I noticed a huge bump in his domain authority overnight, going from 8 to 53. I figured there must have been a reason for that, so I checked their links overview, and noticed they got tons of new external followed links, followed linking domains and total linking domains (see screenshot 1). I clicked on the external followed links to see what they are, and I saw tons of redirect notices (see screenshot 2). The links are from google: maps.google.co.fr cse.google.co.fr images.google.co.fr And .fr is just an example, they have tons of other cctlds like .it .ca .es… the list goes on (see screenshot 3) Do you know where these redirect notices are from? It may be worth noting that some of these redirect to the http version of his website, while others redirect to the https version. I’m guessing this must be a bug on Moz’s end or some sort of SEO trick, but did his DA really go up that much, and does it positively affect his website or will Google penalize this? Thank you in advance for your answers! f9pZoJ3.png M0Z0s9x.png BNQryzR.png
Link Building | | Gael_Regnault0 -
Are followed links from these high authority domains any good?
Hi Mozzers, I have a link building question, in 2 parts. I am in the UK. We have a large local directory network over here which involves some high authority national news domains. Basically, you get a citation for free but if you go "featured" as well as the benefit of being returned top for keyword searches in the directories, buried under a tab on your page are deep links to your website, and they are followed. What are the risks/benefits of this? Are followed links from other high authority domains like Visual.ly and Behance worth it? They are easy to get and I've always believed an easy link usually isn't a good link. Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | Silkstream0 -
Website title has domain name in SERPS but not in the website.
We are using the latest version of Wordpress for one of our website. Now every page in SERPS is like this: SEO Services, Link Building and Social Media - Oursite.com But when we look at our website's title tag its like this: <title>SEO Services, Link Building and Social Media</title> It's very strange, why the website's domain name is appended to the title in SERPS?? Any ideas? Thanks!
Link Building | | TheSEOGuy10 -
Domain Authority and Page Authority down - Change of Server
Dear All, Today I noticed that our page authority and domain authority is down, and the number of linking domains is also down. We do not have too many linking domains to our site, but at least one blogger link to us, with a very nice article about our site (since some months ago) and this link does not appear in the site explorer (follow link). This blog is well indexed by google, but impossible to see using open site explorer for some reason unknown to me; and two pages we helped, and they link also to us (follow links): their links appear in the webmaster tools, but not in the site explorer. Neither the blog nor those two pages were in the site explorer before, the links that were removed are from other sources (SEO analisys pages, automatic generated when I run a test by them, so I supossed not high quality links at all, not content related, we don't miss them). Our site was partially down for 1 1/2 day this week due change of server, from a shared hosting to a VPS. Now all pages are up again, and we are improving everything, working really hard (almost no sleep at all in two days). Could it also have something to do with the lower domain authority? How bad penalized google the time down of a domain? How long will we feel the effects of that? Listing published in our site are ranking exactly as before, but I am afraid this could change in the near future. Since the end of December (not directly related to my question), we do not have this nice snipped showing the main pages of our site, when we writte the exact domain name in google. At the time, we did not any change, and this did not affect the listings ranking (they even improved in some cases); we rank better for the main keyword, so the snipped changed, without other problems. So, the questions: Have made site explorer any change in the last days, to discard low quality links? Could be the lower domain authority related to the down time of our site? How long can be felt the effects of the down time in google results? Is it something that can be felt forever? =( Do you have any idea why google decides in some cases to remove the site links in the snipped? General question, I know it is not possible to answer it for any specific domain without looking at it. We would like to have those links again. Is there something we can do in order site explorer visit that blog I mentioned? I will try to crawl it using the dashboard to see what happen. Many thanks for your help! Daniel
Link Building | | te_c0 -
Link building when your domain name is your head term.
Hello, I am working with a company that their domain name is the same as the head term. For example, if I was going for the head term coffee, and my site was coffee.com. This is specifically in the medical space, and i'm competing directly with Web MD and The Mayo Clinic, my advantage on the term is the EMD. We have a legitimate site with thousands of pages of relevant content, and I am starting a guest blogging campaign on relevant health sites. My real challenge is when I go for anchor text links should I ideally go for [head term] or [headterm.com] as the anchor text. Thanks in advance for your insights Zach
Link Building | | Zachary_Russell0 -
How to increase domain authority
How do I increase my Domain Authority and Page Authority? How do I increase my external links numbers? Regards, Nilesh
Link Building | | vedantcreations0 -
Keyword strong domains`and Good Link Building Techniques
Is it still a vital tactic if you can get a keyword strong domain in your seo strategy. I have been using an outsourced link building company and we have been soing social bookmarks and directory listings and forum posts. What i sthe best way to check if a link is good ? Look forward to any help, I am a new member
Link Building | | simon.paul0 -
Is it worth me considering a reciprocal linking request to my authority site ?
My web site is www.swimmer.co.uk it sells waterproof mp3 players & is the authority site in its niche I have no out going reciprocal links I don't have advertising or encourage reciprocal linking as I thought it may devalue the sites quality & link juice I have had a reciprocal link request from a swim wear based website called www.onlyswim.com that has a reciprocal linking sub-page with many varied links on it that are not just on the subject of swimming I don't think I will get any direct traffic from this website so I was wondering if ts worth me agreeing to a reciprocal link page I think we both have a PR of 2 **Any comments would be much appreciated ** In research to try & answer my own question I have just read this on wikipedia "Reciprocal linking between websites is no longer an important part of the search engine optimization process.Google and other search engines now do not give credit to reciprocal linking as it does not indicate genuine link popularity."
Link Building | | ChrisBIlly0