So how exactly does Moz determine your Domain Authority score?
It uses over 40 different factors, but the following are some of the most important:
- Linking Root Domains – This is the number of unique backlinks your website has earned. So if it has obtained 20 external links from two different websites, then you’ve only had two linking root domains. Earning a few links from different websites will boost your ranking more than earning many links from the same website.
- MozRank – MozRank is the metric used to score the strength of your website’s external links. It takes into account not just the number of links that are pointing back to your site, but also the quality of those links. Quality tends to beat quantity, which means that one good external link is better to have than two low-quality links. MozRank uses a 0-10 scale (with 10 being the highest). The average MozRank rating for a website is a 3.
- MozTrust – Like MozRank, MozTrust is a metric used to help determine the quality of your external links. However, it’s a little more specific in that it measures how closely your website is connected to trusted websites. Trusted websites are .edu or .gov sites. Even if a .edu or .gov site links to a site that then links to you, it’s considered a sign of trust that helps increase your MozTrustrating, which is also based on a 0-10 rating.
- Quality Content – Content is one of the main factors on which a website’s search engine ranking is based on, so it should come as no surprise that the quality of your website’s content is a factor in determining its domain authority. While domain authority may help improve your search engine ranking, it also correlates closely with it.
- Social Signals – Google uses social signals as one of the main factors in identifying good quality content. For example, it’s safe to assume that a piece of content that is shared, liked and commented on hundreds of times must be of some quality. Moz uses the same social signals in determining domain authority.
- Search Engine Friendliness – This refers to the use of SEO as well as to the site structure and user-friendliness of your website. Site structure can directly affect usability in that poor site structure makes your site difficult to navigate. It also makes it difficult for search engines to properly crawl and index your site, which can hurt your rankings. This is essential for your domain authority as well.
How Does Moz Calculate Page Authority?
The following are some of the ranking factors that Moz uses to determine page authority:
- Social signals, such as the number of Google+1’s, Facebook Likes, Twitter Retweetsor LinkedIn Shares a page has received.
- The number of root domains linking to the page.
- The number of root domains linking to the page using partial match anchor text.
- The number of sub domains that link to the page.
- The number of quality websites linking to the page.
- The number of external links a page has.