{"id":1499423,"date":"2022-02-10T08:48:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-10T13:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.practicalecommerce.com\/?p=1499423"},"modified":"2022-09-01T10:38:26","modified_gmt":"2022-09-01T14:38:26","slug":"stop-using-domain-authority-for-seo-backlinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.practicalecommerce.com\/stop-using-domain-authority-for-seo-backlinks","title":{"rendered":"Stop Using Domain Authority for SEO Backlinks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google discontinued its PageRank browser tool in 2016. Since then search engine optimizers have sought an alternative measure of a site’s authority.<\/p>\n

That’s because links remain a key ranking factor, especially links from trustworthy sites. SEOs need a metric to know if a site is worth the link-solicitation effort.<\/p>\n

Thus we now have a mishmash of industry calculations to assess a site’s trust and popularity.<\/p>\n

Domain Authority<\/h3>\n

Moz was among the first platforms with its own web index, which facilitated in 2019 two proprietary PageRank toolbar replacements: Page Authority and Domain Authority. Both are a 100-point scale \u2014 the higher the score, the more authoritative.<\/p>\n

Even now, Moz doesn’t much explain<\/a> how it calculates those metrics. It offered a vague explanation<\/a> at launch: “It is based off data from the Mozscape web index and includes link counts, MozRank and MozTrust scores, and dozens of other factors.”<\/p>\n

Majestic, another SEO platform, also developed an early-day PageRank replacement. It’s called “Citation Flow<\/a>.” It measures the “power” the website or link carries on, also, a 100-point scale.<\/p>\n

Ahrefs’ metric is called Domain Rating<\/a>. It gauges “the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile (in terms of its size and quality).”<\/p>\n

Semrush Rank<\/a>, addressed below, is based on organic rankings.<\/p>\n

Reliable Metric?<\/h3>\n

Domain authority has nothing to do with Google. That alone makes it an unreliable metric for optimizing organic search rankings. Google’s equivalent is likely entirely different with its own formula, spam signals, page history, and more. We can only guess<\/a> how Google determines a page’s authority.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Google never used<\/a> a domain-level metric in its ranking algorithm \u2014 only page-level metrics. Domain authority \u2014 the accumulation of all links pointing to that domain \u2014 never guarantees high rankings, per Google<\/a>.
\n<\/p>\n

Alternatives<\/h3>\n

There is no single way to measure a page’s authority. However, we can cite signals that infer the authority of a page.<\/p>\n