A Guide to DA for Bloggers

Domain Authority (DA) is a third party metric created by Moz. DA is not actually used by Google at all and will have no direct impact on your ranking. Due to this, DA is something I tell my clients not to worry about as it’s more of a vanity metric. I’d much prefer them to look at backlinks and link juice.

However, as a blogger, DA is something you will worry about if you want to work with PRs and brands. With many PRs now looking for bloggers with DAs of 20 or higher.

Just like Google takes into account loads of different factors in ranking your website, so does Moz when calculating your DA. Every month or so, they look at things like the total number of links to your site, the number of different domains that link to you, the spam score of websites that link to you etc. DA scores are on a logarithmic scale, which means it’s much easier to go from 10 to 20 than from 80 to 00.

In the simplest terms, you need high-quality backlinks to your site to improve your DA. Normally quality links come from authoritative sites and having them link to you is almost like getting a vote in confidence.

There are several things you can do improve your DA

– Create shareable content that other bloggers will want to share on their websites.
– If you know a blogger or a brand has mentioned you in a post, drop them a message politely saying that you appreciate the mention and ask them to turn the mention into a link.
– Guest posting is a great way to gain links and build relationships with other content created.
– When working with a brand, if the situation and relationship are right you could ask for them to link to you.
– If a blogger you know offers monthly advertising packages, you could purchase one but don’t do it purely for the link.
– Avoid spammy links – if you are checking DA of sites you want to link to you. Make sure they have a low spam score (SS).

Technically, yes you can but please please don’t. These backlinks are normally very damaging by having high spam scores and can lead to you being penalised by Google. This often leads to you being delisted.

DA scores range between 1 to 100. The higher the authority the better, but again it’s vanity metric. Blogs usually tend to have a DA between 10 and 50, with 25-35 being considered a “good” DA score. Often you do see PRs looking for bloggers DA’s of 20 or higher.

In the simplest form, a backlink is a link from one site to yours.

I personally use this free tool or Moz.

Broken links often occur when you migrate to a new CMS i.e. WordPress to Squarespace but they can also be caused by a post being deleted or moved. When a broken link happens it will take both readers and Google to an Error 404 page. Stopping the link being able to spread equity across your site and creating a bad user journey.

If the broken links on your page are internal, it will be a quick and easy fix. Just simply make the changes within your page by renaming or redirecting the links to the correct pages.

When it is external, it can be a long task to fix. You can reach out to the person linking to your site and asking them to update the link and they will do it. Most of the time you’ll never hear back from them.

Sometimes you might have to disavow those links. Disavowing backlinks could lead to your DA dropping, so you have to be smart and tactical when doing this.

Yes and no. Your DA would not improve if you had no external links pointing to your site even if every page had perfect internal links. But internal linking does help spread link equity and shares the authority across each page. This is how page authority is determined.