Domain authority

I hate to start the SEO due diligence section of this course with something so inconsequential, but it’s actually a great jumping-off point to introduce some of the things we’re going to be looking for!

A massive part of SEO has to do with links. Primarily backlinks. If you don’t know, backlinks are links from one website to another, like if I were to link to wikipedia in one of my blog posts because it gives more information. While these are great ways to give your readers more sources of relevant information that they can consume, it’s also very important for the ranking of your content.

Google views these backlinks as sources of credibility — like a citation in a scientific paper. It’s essentially like a website saying that they trust another website so much that they’ll send their users over there to get more information.

As a website gets more and more of these links, Google’s algorithm “understands” that the website has to be fairly authoritative, trustworthy, and informative if a bunch of other websites are linking to it.

As Google gives more trust to these linked-to websites, their content tends to rank higher in search results because they’ve proven that their other content is good and trustworthy, so it’s likely that their new content is the same way.

No matter how much some people may deny it, backlinks have a huge impact on how a website’s articles rank in search results.

Because of this, it’s almost always fantastic if you can find a website with a lot of high-quality backlinks. This usually indicates that a website has a lot of staying power against Google updates and competition writing similar content. But how can you determine this?

Well, there’s a couple things you’ll look at to judge a website’s backlink profile, but the first thing you can utilize is something called “Domain Authority”.

Domain authority is a score that’s been made up by different SEO tools to give a number to a website’s backlink profile. Typically spanning from 0 to 100, these scores take into account the quantity, strength, and diversity of backlinks that a website has.

A website with no backlinks would be ranked a 0, and the absolute upper echelon of websites would have a 100, like Facebook. These scores also increase at a decreasing rate, meaning it’s much easier to get from 10 to 11 than it is to get from 90 to 91.

Here’s the thing about domain authority (or domain rating as it’s sometimes called) — it’s entirely made up. It’s not a number that Google actually looks at or calculates itself in order to rank websites. Because of this, you can’t look at the domain authority of a website and determine if it’ll necessarily rank well or not.

However, what it is good for is getting an idea if a website is established or not.

It’s typically the first thing I’ll look at when looking into a website’s backlinks, as it usually can tell you a lot about a website.

If a website has a domain authority from 0 to 5, for example, I can assume that the website is relatively new and ranks for keywords that don’t have a lot of competition. This means that these websites are vulnerable to competitors stealing their rankings.

On the other hand, a website with a domain authority around 30 is typically pretty well-established and authoritative with a lot of staying power with their rankings.

What I’ll do is cross-check a website’s domain authority with its competitors’. If it’s much lower, there’s a good chance that the website’s good rankings won’t continue forever. If it’s the same or higher, then I feel a lot more confident because it’s as authoritative or more authoritative than competitors.

Ultimately, domain authority is a great launching-off point that you’ll look at before diving deep into backlink analysis. It tells you what you can generally expect in terms of authoritativeness — something that’s very important for websites in all niches.