Hey lovelies, today we’re going to go over Domain Authority or DA, page authority, and your websites spam score. These are really important things you NEED to know as a blogger if you’re wanting to grow and to eventually monetise.
I’ve really been enjoying updating my content lately, so I’m really happy to be writing a post on Domain Authority again.
Disclaimer – there are links to my own products and affiliate links in this post.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain authority or DA is a metric created by Moz, that ranks a website on a scale of 1-100, (100 being the best and 1 being the worst). In short the higher the domain authority of a website, the higher its ranking in search engines.
You must own your own domain to have a domain score. If you have a blog with .wordpress or .blogspot you won’t have your own DA score.
You can check your Domain Authority for free on Moz.
What is Page Authority?
Page Authority or PA is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well an individual page will rank on search engine result pages. Page Authority also scores from 1-100, the higher the score. The higher the ability to rank.
Here you can read more on Page Authority.
Why Are These Scores Important To A Blogger?
When working with brands most opportunities will be based on DA, and this normally starts at 20+, although many brands find 30+ desirable. This is because brands want to work with bloggers who can organically rank. It’s beneficial to a brand to have a link back from a blogger with a good Domain Authority.
If you’re looking to grow your blog then a DA score will be important to you. If you’re blogging for fun you may have no need to know yours let alone improve it.
How Do I Improve My Domain Authority
Before I start, improving your domain authority is not an overnight job. It can take months to start ranking higher. It can happen quickly, but it depends on a lot of factors. Don’t get disheartened if you don’t see instant results.
Fix your broken links – Do it now. I recently let mine run up to 800 before I fixed them and this is actually really damaging to your domain score. You want to avoid broken links at all cost. Jenny has a great post on broken links.
Age – Much like wine, your domain gets better with age. A factor that’s taken into account is how long you have left before your domain expires. The longer the better.
Internal linking – You ideally need 2-3 internal links on every post on your site. When you post something new, link it older, relevant articles. This will also pass link juice from old posts to the new one.
Loading speed – This is now a factor in how you rank. If your site is not loading within 3 seconds, you should start working on speed optimization. You can check your site speed on Pingdom. Mine for example is 5 seconds meaning it is too slow!
Gaining Backlinks – Guestposting, commenting on other blogs, or having your content shared on other platforms is so important. All will earn you an active backlink. You really want to aim for DA’s that are higher than yours, for example if you have a DA of 8 and you guest post on a DA of 12 and a DA of 28, the backlink from the DA 28 is more beneficial.
Make sure you don’t have any crawlability issues – This will be a big issue if you do. As google won’t be crawling your site properly. You can learn more about crawlability here.
Optimising Your Posts
Another way to work on your domain authority is to improve your SEO. Both on-page and off-page.
Keywords – If you want to rank on google, and bring in organic views you need to know your keywords. Your keyword needs to be in your post, in your title, metadata, alt text and more. If you’re struggling to get your posts to rank grab a copy of Nele’s Keyword Research For Bloggers (AF) you can use ‘kayleighzara’ for 1/3 off. I have hundreds of posts that rank thanks to Nele’s help! I genuinely couldn’t recommend it more.
Your post length – Your posts need to be over 300 words! But ideally you should be aiming for 900+.
Optimise your images – Be sure to include keywords in the file name and fill out the alternate text field with a brief, keyword rich description of the photo.
Make content worth sharing – The more a piece of content is shared, the better it ranks. So create quality content that your readership love and you’ll be on the right track!
If you’re with WordPress install Yoast – This plugin will really help you if you’re with with WordPress.
Headings – You need to be using a variety of headings in a blog post, on WordPress this is H2 & H3.
To learn more about SEO, pick up Nele’s ebooks. I can’t even tell you how much they’ve helped my blog.
SEO for Bloggers Ebook (AF) The ultimate guide for SEO for bloggers. You can use ‘kayleighzara’ for a 1/3 off the price.
Keyword Research For Bloggers (AF) – This is a MUST have tool for those struggling to rank. I’ve gone from ranking on 28 keywords to 400+. You can use ‘kayleighzara’ for a 1/3 off the price.
Off-Page SEO For Bloggers (AF) This guide teaches you about all the things you can do to improve your SEO away from your blog posts. You can use ‘kayleighzara’ for a 1/3 off the price.
My Score Fluctuates, Why?
With Domain Authority, fluctuation is really normal. So your domain authority might go up 3 points and then go down 2. This is nothing to worry about. Moz, released this statement on why your score fluctuates.
Your link profile growth hasn’t yet been captured in the Moz web index.
The highest-authority sites experienced substantial link growth, skewing the scaling process.
You earned links from places that don’t contribute to Google ranking.
We crawled (and included in our index) more or fewer of your linking domains than we had previously.
Your Domain Authority is on the lower end of the scoring spectrum and is thus more impacted by scaling fluctuation.
Spam Score – What Is It & How Does It Affect My Blog
There are many misconceptions of a Spam Score, what it is and how it affects your website so I’m going to go over it here. A pro tip if as a blogger you do not understand what you are talking about – don’t broadcast it to your followers. I’ve seen so many people talk about spam scores recently who have no idea what they’re on about.
What is a Spam Score
Here is Moz’s statement on the Spam Score metric.
“A Spam Score represents the percentage of sites with similar features we’ve found to be penalized or banned by Google. Our machine learning model identified 27 common features among the millions of banned or penalized sites in the data we fed it.”
In Moz’s own words a Spam Score is NOT how spammy your website is. It has absolutely zero to do with spam. It measures your website against sites that have been penalised of banned by google based on 27 common features. Which I will include in this post. Moz goes on to say.
This is based on correlation with penalization rather than causation, the solution isn’t necessarily to change these factors on your site. If you have not had any penalties you shouldn’t be concerned about a Low or Medium score.
Understanding The Score
A score of 1%-30% is considered a Low Spam Score.
A score of 31%-60% is considered a Medium Spam Score.
A score of 61%-100% is considered a High Spam Score.
A high Spam Score for your site, or a site you’re looking at, doesn’t mean this site is necessarily spammy. It’s a sign that you should do some more investigation into the quality and relevance of this site.
If you’re struggling to lower your score. Take a look at the list of 27 features below it is based on and it might help you. Once you’ve implemented this, it can take a while for your score to go down. If it doesn’t work you may then need to disavow links, but in most cases this isn’t something you’ll need to do immediately. I have disavowed links before and it made a less of an impact to my spam score that following the list below. If you’d like to see a post on how to disavow links please let me know in the comments.
The 27 Features The Spam Score Tracks
This is the direct list as stated by moz, the number isn’t in correlation with the importance. Once I had found this list it was evident to me why I had previously had an issue with my Spam Score getting higher.
1. Low number of pages found Our crawlers discovered only a small number of pages on this domain. This is not an inherent problem, but many spam sites have small numbers of pages, hence the correlation.
2. TLD correlated with spam domains This domain’s top-level domain extension (e.g. .info, .cc, .pl, etc) is one that many spam domains use.
3. Domain name length The length of the subdomain and root domain is similar to those used by spam sites.
4. Domain name contains numerals Like many spam sites, this domain name contains numeric characters.
5. Google Font API Present This domain does not use special fonts (e.g. Google Font API). Lacking this feature was common among spam sites we found.
6. Google Tag Manager Google Tag Manager is almost never present on spam sites.
7. Doubleclick Present The Doubleclick ad tag is almost never present on spam sites.
8. Phone Number Present Spam sites rarely have real phone numbers present on their pages.
9. Links to LinkedIn Almost no spam sites have an associated LinkedIn page, hence lacking this feature is correlated with spam.
10. Email Address Present Email addresses are almost never present on spam sites.
11. Defaults to HTTPS Few spam sites invest in SSL certificates; HTTPS is often a good trust signal.
12. Use of Meta Keywords Pages that use the meta keywords tag are more likely to be spam than those that don’t.
13. Visit Rank Websites with very few visits in clickstream panels were more often spam than those with high numbers of visits.
14. Rel Canonical Utilizing a non-local rel=canonical tag is often associated with spam.
15. Length of Title Element Pages with very long or very short titles are correlated with spam sites.
16. Length of Meta Description Pages with very long or very short meta description tags are correlated with spam sites.
17. Length of Meta Keywords Pages with very long meta keywords tags are often found on spam sites.
18. Browser Icon Spam sites rarely use a favicon; non-spam sites often do.
19. Facebook Pixel The Facebook tracking pixel is almost never present on spam sites.
20. Number of External Outlinks Spam sites are more likely to have abnormally high or low external outlinks.
21. Number of Domains Linked-To Spam sites are more likely to have abnormally high or low unique domains to which they link.
22. Ratio of External Links to Content Spam sites are more likely to have abnormal ratios of links to content.
23. Vowels/Consonants in Domain Name Spam sites often have many sequential vowels or consonants in their domain name.
24. Hyphens in Domain Name Spam sites are more likely to use multiple hyphens in their domain name.
25. URL Length Spam pages often have abnormally short or long URL path lengths.
26. Presence of Poison Words Spam sites often employ specific words that are associated with webspam topics like pharmaceuticals, adult content, gaming, and others.
27. Uses High CPC Anchor Text Spam sites often employ specific words in the anchor text of outlinks that are associated with webspam topics like pharmaceuticals, adult content, gaming, and others.
I know this has been absolutely massive post, but if you found it helpful share it on Twitter or Pinterest! It helps me a lot. Tell me in the comments if you’re trying to grow your domain authority, and how high you’d like yours to be!
If you enjoyed this post and you’re looking for some advice to help you grow your blog check out my 35 Useful Resources For Bloggers
I’m currently trying to figure out SEO and DA for my site and honestly find it quite confusing but you have explained it in a very clear way here so thank you, this has been very helpful.
Great post Kayleigh. My DA score seems stuck between 11 and 12 no matter what I do. But there are some things from this that I definitely need to do.
This list of blogging jobs is ever growing! Thank you for sharing your knowledge, here’s to increasing my DA score over the coming months x x
Kayleigh this was such an informative and detailed post. I am trying to boost my da score and improve my SEO on my blog posts. I have brought Nele’s 3 guides through your link and I am learning a lot. Thank you for explaining all the spam related stuff and would love to read a post about you disavow links.
Thank you for sharing.
Lauren http://www.bournemouthgirl.com
Really interesting and informative. I am still learning in this blogging environment so is useful
Thanks for sharing
https://uncuaderno4cero.wordpress.com/
This is such a helpful post Kayleigh! My site’s speed is something that I definitely need to work on moving forward x
https://www.femaleoriginal.com
This is a really interesting and useful post! My DA recently went down a few points and I’m looking to grow it agin so thanks for all these tips xx
Wow, all this information from Moz was so interesting and useful. I actually detest Moz for how it refuses to pick up backlinks that I’ve worked so hard to build (and I know I’m not alone in this), I just wish opportunities weren’t so reliant on a DA score. Page views are equally important, I think 🙂 x
I am looking to increase my DA score so will be referring back to this post quite a lot to help me I think! Thanks for sharing Kayleigh 🙂
Lauren / https://www.wooloftheking.com/
Kayleigh, this is such a helpful post! I’ve been wanting to try and up my DA for such a long time but haven’t found any posts that explain it as well as yours. Thankfully I’ve got time right now to work on it! Thank you so much!
Samantha | https://samanthajblogs.co.uk
This is really helpful, been looking for ways to improve my da. Thank you for this
Thank you so much for creating this post! It’s sooooo helpful and I’m going to bookmark it and check back later xx
Caroline | https://envirolineblog.com/
Such a clear and informative post! Super helpful!
I will definitely be taking away a few points from this and incorporating it into my own site!
Wow I can only imagine how many hours went into creating this blog post and all I can say is: THANK YOU!!
In my 9-5 job, I work a lot with bloggers on their DAs and a lot of what you’ve said is spot on!!
Rosie
Thank you so much for creating this post! I’m hoping to really work on my DA this year and I will definitely be referring back to this post xx
I never knew this about the spam score (although I did figure it isn’t good haha). These are thing you easily overlook in the beginning, so thanks for sharing so much about this!
Before reading this I literally knew nothing about DA scores and how to increase your own so thank you so much for sharing! I’ll definitely be coming back to this post soon. Xx
This was such an informative post! My DA keeps going down rather than up which is a pain but I’m hoping to work on it as much as possible! Thank you for sharing.
Tash – A Girl with a View
This is great information! I have been actively working on building my DA as of late in the hope of hitting that 20 mark as my first big goal. As you mentioned, most brands that I have seen are requesting a DA of 20+, so getting to that milestone would really help open new doors for monetization opportunities.
I love that you took the time to break down the factors considered in the Spam score. That’s something that most blogs on this topic overlook and I have seen many bloggers stressed out because they see a 3 or something else super low in their spam rating.
I did not know all this about spam score! Thanks so much for explaining it in so much detail I definitely need to look into mine! Caitylis x
Great read Kayleigh. Another insightful post for those not in the know.
This was so helpful and well explained! There are plenty of things that we still need to check for our DA but i am glad to see that some things we are doing are right! Saved this for later reference, thanks for creating this, it’s a life saver! x
Very informative! I’m working on SEO and improving the rank and organic views. Definitely going to check Nele’s course. Thank you for sharing!
This was so useful — thank you so much for sharing this. I’m going to be reading this and referring to it again!
This was super useful! I have really been trying to improve my SEO and DA (which is tough with a full time job and just being a hobby blogger) but this has helped me to think about other things I can do! The broken links I am getting through and it’s not the most fun to do 🤣 thanks for this x
Everyday I feel like I’m learning something new about blogging. Today it is Domain Authority. Thank you for this post. I learned so much. I will definitely be using these tips to improve my DA.
This is helpful for increasing domain authority! Gonna check your recommended courses out!
Thanks for sharing!
Epifania | http://www.femaleblogpreneur.com
This is such a valuable post and it has so much useful information! This will definitely be a great help to me x
Lucy | http://www.lucymary.co.uk
I’m dreading going through and fixing all my broken links but now that I know how important it is I’m doing it tomorrow, no more putting it off!
I can’t explain how informative and helpful this is to me as a new blogger! Currently, I’m very concerned with the health of my blog regarding broken links, error 404 pages, crawlability, loading speed, and more. I wonder if there is a site that would help me for free? I also want to increase my Domain Authority the sooner but I know time is also a valuable factor. Really loved this post! Learned a lot! Thank you for this.
http://www.lifebeginsattwenty.com
This was a highly informative post for me. I didn’t even know that there was something called Domain Authority that I had to be looking after. I learnt a lot about blogging from this post. Thank you so much for this!
Such a helpful post! I had no clue what a DA score was a couple years ago and I’ve been working to improve it since.
Thank you for sharing such a valuable information. DA is something I’ve been working on since recently. It can be quite overwhelming. This post definitely makes it a lot clearer.
This is something I really want to get on top of this year, thanks so much for all the tips!
Katie | katieemmabeauty.com
This is such a helpful post! It’s good to learn about a spam score too, as I never hear anyone talk about that one so at least I finally understand what it means now. Thanks for sharing xx
Hannah | https://luxuryblush.co.uk/
This is a very helpful post! There is so much information here and several items like spam score that I never knew about. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for putting this post together! Tons of info here !
I had no idea how the spam score worked until I read this! I don’t have a problem with it right now, but that’s good to know. Thanks so much for all the helpful info and tips on increasing DA!
Fantasic tips well worth following along. This will be something to look at closely
Wow such an informative post, thank you. Honestly as a new ish blogger I find all the DA/SEO stuff kinda confusing but you’ve explained it well. I’m a bit confused whether I would have one or not, my domain is thesundayblogger.com but it’s done through wordpress?.. xx
These are some wonderful tips on DA. I am taking my time fixing broken links and looking at keywords on older posts, very helpful post
This has been so helpful for me! I am very much trying to improve my DA at the moment and I will definitely be taking all your amazing tips on board Kayleigh. Thank you for another wonderful post, always such helpful content!
Rachel: https://rachtalksbusiness.com/
Really useful and interesting info. I didn’t know about it.
Thanks for a wonderful post 😊
https://uncuaderno4cero.wordpress.com/
Such a great post with helpful information! I’ll definitely be using it to examine my site and see what needs working on. Especially helpful about checking for broken links.
Super comprehensive post! Great information here and lot for bloggers to work with. You should check out RankMath over Yoast for SEO. Although both are just for basic checks, RankMath is better
This was just the post I needed. So interesting about the spam score!
Katy | http://www.katystephenson.com
Oh my goodness gal, I love this! I’ve been wondering about my DA score for a while now and boom, you just answered all of my questions! Such a brilliant post, thank you for sharing your tips xx
Teresa Maria | Outlandish Blog
I think DA scores are so interesting, as they’re affected by so much. This was such a comprehensive guide and even I learnt something! Thank you for sharing all of these tips. I think working on improving old pages is something I need to work on the most!
Em x
Such a great and helpful post, Kayleigh! I’m working on increasing my DA score this year. I want it to reach 20+ by the end of 2021! Guest posting has been so helpful for now. Improving the 3 aspects of SEO also really beneficial 🙂
Interesting – thank you!
This is such a helpful and informative post! Thanks so much for sharing these tips, I’ll definitely be putting them to good use x
Sophie | https://www.loveandliterature.co.uk
I didn’t realise that we should be linking to internal pages more than once in a post to help improve DA, I’ll have to work on that. Thank you for sharing these useful tips.
Such a detailed and helpful post! I’m going to sit down this weekend and work my way through all your tips to hopefully work on improving my site. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
This was such a helpful post! Thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge in this area!
This is so helpful! Do you need to self-host or if you have a plan via WordPress (and therefore your own domain) will you still get a DA score?
Wow! I’ve learned a whole lot after reading this post! Really helpful and important info in this article! Pinning this for reference! Thank you kindly for sharing these valuable tips.
This is something I really need to work on.
Your article was easy to understand, and very helpful.
Thanks for sharing this!
This post is so helpful, especially the bit about spam score! I never properly understood it properly until now. Thanks for explaining!
Thank you for the informative post.
I’ve been blogging for a few months now and have gotten fully into the swing of it, now it’s time to start generating organic traffic to my blog without having to largely rely on social medias like Twitter.
Thanks!
Helpful post. I need to read this post right now. Just started back with my blog after some time away. There are a few things that I am going to start doing again. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for sharing this post; I had not heard of DA before and will start working on some of the tips you have given!