The Importance of Domain Authority (DA) in Backlink Strategy

Backlink creation is an important part of off-page SEO. Various factors are taken into account when ranking a website. Some of the well-known factors are keyword optimization, dwell time, bounce rate, E.E.A.T., and, of course, backlinks. A backlink is just a hyperlink from a website that points to your website. Why do they matter in SERP ranking? Well, Google checks the quality and quantity of backlinks to a website to gauge its authenticity. Authenticity is very important to Google because they want to show the best search results to their users. A large number of authentic websites linking to another website is a sign that it is authentic as well. 

Webmasters try all sorts of ways to get more backlinks for their sites, but as you may have noticed, the quality is more valuable than the quantity. And how do they know if a backlink is high quality? By checking the DA (domain authority). In this article, we will check out what is DA, why SEO specialists use it to ascertain the quality of a backlink, and at what DA is a backlink considered “high quality”? Let us start with what is DA.

DA, as you know, stands for domain authority. It is a metric developed by Moz (an SEO and Marketing Tools company). DA is a metric used to determine the credibility and authenticity of a website. The higher the DA, the more authoritative that website is. The score ranges from 0 to 100 and the higher the score, the better the DA.

It is important to note that DA is not a metric used for ranking websites. In fact, search engines do not use DA at all. But clearly, there are some similarities in the way DA and SERP ranking are calculated because more often than not they mirror each other. That’s why DA is so often used for determining the quality of backlinks from a website. Now that we have understood that, let’s see how DA is measured.

We don’t exactly know how DA is measured because the algorithm is the intellectual property of Moz. However, we do have some insights into what factors are considered when measuring DA, thanks to a community post on the Moz forums. Here is the comment in question.

From that comment, we can see that linking root domains, the number of links, and some Moz-specific metrics are used to find the rank. 

Now, let’s talk about how you can measure the DA of your own websites (or any other website for that matter). To do that, you can use Moz’s very own DA checker tool. It’s a free tool, but the caveat is that you only get three queries per day. There are also alternative DA measurement services that have made a free DA PA checker tool available online. The good thing about these third-party DA PA checkers is that they are accurate. They provide the same results as Moz’s own tool. You can see that in the following image.

Third-Party Tool

Moz

Now, we get to the real question. Everything else in this article was merely a preamble that was setting up this question. Now, the answer is not straightforward. Because the answer is “it depends”. As a rule of thumb, you should always look for websites that have 50+ DA. But you may want to take a look at the following points as well.

So, that should answer your question about which DA should be considered when trying to get backlinks.

We checked out what is DA, how it is measured, and how it is an important metric to check when getting backlinks. While there are specific things you need to consider when checking the DA of websites, generally you should just gun for 40+ authority websites. They are the ones that are easy to get backlinks from and also boost your website’s authority. And that should be all you need to know.

Routine tasks take a lot of time from employees? Do they burn out, do not have enough working day for the main duties and important things? Do you understand that the only way out of this situation in modern realities is automation? Try Apix-Drive for free and make sure that the online connector in 5 minutes of setting up integration will remove a significant part of the routine from your life and free up time for you and your employees.