How to recover your DA from Domain Authority 2.0

Firstly, DA is not a Google metric. It is a metric created by Moz to give a score out of 100 of how your site may rank. Domain Authority caught on in 2016 when Google stopped displaying Page Rank as a way for SEOs to measure the quality and worth of a website. If your DA has gone done, it does not mean your Google ranking has gone down or your organic search engine traffic will decrease.

Since DA was easily manipulated, especially by link sellers and spammers, it became outdated. It was those websites that used SEO tactics that were ranking well for DA as opposed to those that had good quality content.

The response to this was to update DA to make it more accurate. Domain Authority 2.0 has a bigger link index, a new machine learning model, incorporates spam score and can detect link manipulation. Also – it updates daily!

Remember that DA is relative.

This means that you should be comparing your DA with those websites that are similar to you. If you have dropped 10 points, but everyone else has – then don’t worry about it.

The new DA is a new metric. So don’t think of your new score as having lost or gained DA points. It’s was your DA should always have been if this new algorithm was in place.

That being said, having a drop in DA sucks. Mine has dropped which is frustrating. But I have always questioned having a DA in it’s the 50s for the past few years, as I don’t particularly think my website ranks high on Google or gets much traffic.

When you check your DA, you can look at the history of your metrics. This shows you what your DA has been for the last year. My current DA is at 33 – down from 51! In April 2018 it was 36 according to the history. You can also look at your linking domains and mine tells me that I’ve lost 1000 links int he past year. Searching a bit more tells me that I have some spam websites linking to me which I assume is something to do with when I was hacked – these links are slowly dropping off so I can only assume I have a lower DA because of these links dropping off, and these spam links are causing me an issue. I really need to find out what these are so I can disavow them, but that means I’ll have to pay for some software to tell me what they are! I’m glad to see they are decreasing – I assume these sites are getting deleted. Phew.

Anyway, going forward DA will be more responsive to Google changes like Penguin or Panda.

If you want to improve your DA, here’s what you need to do:

Don’t think of it as trying to increase your DA, think of it as trying to build a quality site that ranks well in Google. Check out my complete guide to auditing your blog, with step by step guides on how to rank better in search.

• Build high-quality links
• Focus on internal linking on all your blog posts
• Guest post
• Lean and implement SEO
• Fix indexing errors
• Speed up your website
• Write quality content consistently
• Delete broken links
• Write posts that are engaging and that people will share
• Remove any bad backlinks to your site
• Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
• Be active on social media

In other words – practice good SEO which involves building a good quality website that is usable, engaging, regular and trustworthy.

Over the past few months, I’ve been writing a blog series about how to complete an SEO audit of your blog to rank better in Google search. Focus on improving these aspects of your website to increase your reach in Google, which will then see an increase in Domain Authority.

THE SEO BLOG AUDIT SERIES:

• How to complete an SEO Audit for your blog.
• Step 1: Http vs Https
• Step 2: Rank for your brand name.
• Step 3: On page SEO.
• Step 4: Site speed.
• Step 5: Structured Data Errors
• Step 6: Broken Links
• Step 7: Mobile Site Speed
• Step 8: Indexing Errors
• Step 9: Crawl Report
• Step 10: Check the keywords you rank for.