April 16th, 2010 by Dan

Domain authority is a simple enough concept to understand. It measures the number of quality pages that link to your site domain, and the ways in which they do so. Since it is a way that search engines gauge domain trust, it’s an important part of search engine reputation management.

If you use a search engine optimisation company, you’ve no doubt heard of PageRank and link juice. Page Rank is Google’s own patent for ranking the importance of a particular page, although it is different to the algorithm that decides who gets placed where. Whenever you do a search, even of something quite unusual, you’ll see something like “1 – 10 of about 400,000″ at the top of the Google page. Yet as we all know, it is only those first 10 or so that are important. Few people bother to search further than page 2. The ranking order is decided by Google, but all search engines have a ranking algorithm of some kind.

The original PageRank algorithm supposedly only took individual pages into account, thus giving each URL on your site its own individual authority. However, link building services believe ranking is also done on a domain basis, meaning page ranking may depend not only on how many links that one page gets, but how many links the site domain receives in total. When you look at PageRank values for your site, the highest value is usually given to the home page. “Link juice” refers to the distribution of this ranking value to internal links deeper embedded in the site – sub-categories, product pages, etc. Different links carry different amounts of juice, and SEO services suggest it’s most effective to get links from pages with the least outbound links on them – the less links there are, the more link juice will pass.

When looking at domain authority, Google will look at both the number of links your site has acquired, and the number of domains those links were acquired from. For example, 10,000 links from 20 different domains will look a lot less impressive (and a lot less trustworthy) than, say, 8,000 links from 200 domains. A few years ago, the unethical practices sites went to, in order to achieve high rankings got ridiculous. Scammers, and look very closely at suspicious figures. They also look at how domains link to each other – i.e. are the registration details the same? To avoid problems, don’t use fake marketing techniques between your sites – and get quality links with as many different domains as possible.

One of the best ways to improve your search engine optimization is by embedding deep links to your site on external pages, for example social media sites. Setting up link building strategies around deep, inbound links help individual site pages develop authority and trust. Link juice will flow more readily to pages at the low end of the site hierarchy, if there are lots of people linking to them from outside. Domain authority is achieved by emphasising multiple pages on your site, not just the home page. It’s an important thing to remember on any online reputation management plan.

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