Domain Authority is a score, from 1 to 100, given to a website to predict how well it will rank on search engine results.
The idea is that the higher the score, the more likely it is for a website to rank high on search results.
This score is calculated by looking at several factors, including the number and quality of other websites that link to your site.
But these days, worrying about building domain authority is useless.
In this guide, I will show you the problems with domain authority and what you should focus on instead to build a successful website, such as a blog.
Domain Authority Doesn’t Come from Google
Domain Authority is a completely made-up number.
It’s not something that Google or other search engines would use to determine your website’s success.
Domain Authority was originally invented by a company called Moz, an SEO company.
They developed the DA to understand how a website’s search engine ranking might be influenced by its inbound links.
These days, there are dozens of SEO tools that have their own definition of domain authority score. So one SEO tool might claim the domain authority to be 10 while another claims it to be 50.
What Impacts Your Domain Authority?
The main factor is the number of quality links that point to your website.
In other words, if there are other websites that link to your pages, your domain authority will increase.
And the higher the reputation of the site that links to you, the better!
This is why many SEO gurus tell you to build links to a website from trusted resources.
My Case
I’ve built 4 profitable sites with millions of readers in the past year or so.
And guess what, before making this video I had no clue what the DAs of my sites were.
But now that I made this video, I decided to check it and had a bit of a laugh as I did.
For example, one of my sites that has almost 5,000,000 page views from Google.
But it only has a DA of 27, which is considered “poor” and should get no traffic.
This clearly states that the domain authority is not that big of a deal. Also, I have another smaller niche site with 10k+ visitors last month with a DA score of 5…
Clearly, things aren’t adding up.
Let’s consider why.
The Big Issue with DA (and SEO in General)
The biggest problem I see with SEO and metrics like DA is jargonizing.
Basically, the SEO industry makes building websites sound way harder and more technical than it actually is.
An SEO guru might tell you: “To build strong DA, acquire do-follow backlinks from highly reputable root domains.”
While in reality, it’s just a euphemistic way to say: “To build a successful website, you need to write content pages that answer visitors’ questions.”
But hey, the latter doesn’t sell.
Have you looked at the pricing of the SEO tools these days? I’ve seen plans as high as $1,000/month.
To sell this pricey software, you need to convince the site owner that there’s no way to build a reputable site without one.
But the game is evolving fast.
These days, building a website is no longer a technical affair. You definitely don’t need to worry about links, domain authority, or other such SEO factors.
Building Links Is Also Useless
One of the main factors that impact the DA of a website is backlinks or links from other websites.
Many SEO guides tell you to build links to increase the DA of your website.
But here’s the thing.
Building links to a website is like buying followers to social media accounts—completely useless.
Google knows very well when links are built and when they come naturally.
Instead of building DA with links, you should write epic blog posts or content pages that people link to naturally.
Building links to a website is just a waste of time/money.
As a blog owner, I get tens of link acquisition requests every day. I’ve never accepted one. And those people are willing to pay me up to $200 per link.
You can only imagine how hard it would be to get a backlink for free…
And for what?
To trick Google and cheat the system to think that your site is more reputable and trustworthy than it actually is… Not a good idea!
How to Actually Build Domain Authority
Let’s consider how you can actually build the “real domain authority”.
Please, don’t get me wrong here!
Google and other search engines still use backlinks to help rank web pages. And it makes sense. The more people have used your site as a resource, the more likely it is of high quality.
But here’s the thing. All of this happens behind the scenes.
Backlinks and many other ranking factors are implementation details of Google’s algorithm. It’s something you should not worry about—unless you work for Google as a software developer.
All you need is to build your website to be a truly useful and valuable resource.
Your blog posts and content pages should be so epic that people naturally share them on social media or link to those in their blogs.
Example: Tennis Website
Let’s say you run a tennis business and want to build a tennis website.
You want to start selling merch and other tennis gear online.
One of the best bets is by getting free traffic from Google to your tennis site. In other words, you want to rank for searches like “Tennis shirts”, “Tennis rackets”, “Tennis shoes”, and such.
At this point, an SEO guru would sell you some consulting services and expensive tools.
But the reality is that there are absolutely no hacks, shortcuts, or tricks you can use to get to the top of the search results.
The only way to do this is by building a blog for the tennis website and writing a ton of tennis-related informational content to it.
These posts should be something like “How to start tennis” or “What are the best shoes”, etc.
More importantly, each blog post should be the best resource on the internet about the topic. Otherwise, Google will not recommend those to searchers.
The idea is to become a trusted resource that covers tennis from A to Z.
When Google and other search engines trust your website enough, you will start appearing high on the search results.
This takes time. It can easily take years of full-time work. And trust me, there’s no shortcut to success.
Wrapping Up
And that’s a wrap for today!
To build a successful website, you need to write a ton of informational niche-specific blog posts/content pages to it.
Worrying about domain authority or backlinks is completely useless.
If your website has low domain authority, it can still attract millions of views. As long as you write truly useful content.
Also, if you have high domain authority, that’s not a guarantee you will get a ton of traffic.
It’s the content quality that matters.
Just make sure to write blog posts that are epic and the best resources on the internet. The rest comes naturally.
Thanks for reading. Happy writing!