Domain authority (DA) is one of the most important factors to consider in any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. DA is used to determine how trustworthy a site is. As such, it is a critical element which search engines consider when ranking any website.
In order to determine DA, search engines examine these three aspects: size of the website, site’s popularity, and age of the domain. Domain age is important for determining DA because it signifies the length of time that the site has been online—generally speaking, if a site has been around for several years, then it can be regarded as trustworthy.
Website size refers to the actual coverage of the website—the larger and more comprehensive it is, the better. It can be analogous to a voluminous reference book. The more pages a dictionary has, the more information it contains, and the more authoritative it will be.
Domain popularity, meanwhile, covers the inbound links for that particular website. However, these backlinks often do more harm than good, if the external pages linking to the client’s website themselves have low DA. This is why it is important for SEO specialists to only provide reliable, trustworthy external sources to connect with the sites of their clients. An inbound link implies confidence, so having sites with high DA linking back to the client website will increase DA.
Taken as a whole, these three factors comprise DA. Having high DA is integral to keeping a website afloat in the search engine rankings. And because this operates on a logarithmic scale (out of 100), the higher the DA, the more difficult it is to improve it. Constantly monitoring DA is essential to understanding its progress. This article will go over three of the most effective free tools to monitor a site’s domain authority.
1. Bulk Domain Authority Checker by Robin Gupta
Robin Gupta is not an unknown when it comes to the world of web marketing. The SEO specialist is renowned for his innovative solutions focused on helping the SEO community at large. And his bulk DA checker, released earlier this year, was no exception.
The new tool allowed professionals to examine the DA of hundreds of websites at a time. The web-based tool, found on Gupta’s website, is fast and easy to use, addressing the needs of SEO consultants worldwide.
In addition to showing the DA, the tool also shows any website’s Alexa ranking and Google PageRank, which are also important to SEO.
Open Site Explorer by SEOmoz
Popular SEO reference SEOmoz also includes an effective tool to examine websites. While a premium SEOmoz membership is required to access all the features, the free version is robust on its own.
Availing the free registration is a must, however—guest users can only have three daily reports, 200 link checks, and the top five link metrics. Entering a URL into the tool instantly provides four measurements: the page authority, which predicts the ranking potential of a page; the linking root domains, which counts the number of unique domains linking to the URL; the total links, which is the number of all the links to the URL; and the DA.
This is just the beginning of the tool’s coverage—integrated tabs allow the examination of linking pages, top pages, linking domains, and anchor text distribution. The tool even provides functionality to exporting CSV, which will be useful when conducting offline analyses.
Quick Domain Compare by Link Research Tools
This web application is a more basic tool for those who don’t wish to go in as deep as Open Site Explorer. However, it is highly accessible and, as its name indicates, enables the rapid comparison of up to five domains in a convenient chart format. The app compares domains using a number of useful metrics, including the POWER metric, Google PageRank, domain backlinks, .edu and .gov backlinks, number of ranking-keywords, domain popularity, and Alexa rank.
Using these three free tools effectively, as complements to each other, will work wonders for the SEO campaign of any website. Gaining a thorough understanding of the inner workings of DA is important to SEO operations. These tools’ integration of other metrics in addition to DA will also provide a comprehensive benchmark for the SEO performance of the domain.
About author: Vincent Sevilla is a marketing consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing tools and free affiliate marketing lessons.
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