Domain Authority

[Potatoe]

I have some questions about DA. I was going to ask here but I didn't want to hijack the thread.

I've read that it's kind of viewed as a fool's metric and easy to fake and not all that meaningful, so when you're talking about a DA Stack for example, is that different because you know the sites you're using are powerhouses who have earned the high DA?

But also I noticed that @stackcash (and totally not trying to call you out here haha) looks for guest posts on sites with DA 25+, is that just so you have *something* to go by so you aren't dropping hundreds on links from brand new sites? How come DA is what you use as the watermark instead of something else?

When I do outreach for guest posts (sidenote: I found a method that's been working really nice for this by the way, I can do up a post on that if anyone's interested. I've gotten about 20 leads for posts this week just from sending messages while I poop.) I don't look at any metrics, I just make sure it's a real site in my niche, I figure that's the most natural way. If I end up writing a few extra articles for really low-powered sites, I mean, that's got to at least help muddy the waters as opposed to a backlink profile where every contextual link just so happens to be a minimum of X or Y metrics, right?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can shine some light on this. Of course DA is a piece of the puzzle, but I'm curious to hear everyone's opinions because it seems like sometimes it gets a lot more credit than other times.

 

[stackcash]

It's just a benchmark.

Word on the street is that TrustFlow is a more accurate metric compared to what people think Google uses than DA.

I've just used DA as the benchmark since not as many outreach providers understand TF. That's really the only reason. I'm sure guys that understand the inner workings of each metric can shed some more light on this.

 

[Ryuzaki]

DA (domain authority from Moz's Open Site Explorer) seems to be about two things, the number of domains linking in to your entire domain including the most trash domains out there. As I said elsewhere, all you need to do is get enough traffic from any source to rank up on Alexa enough and those scraper sites do the rest. Land a Wikipedia link and get double, and then the registry list scrapers take you home. You can get to DA10-15 with almost no work. At that range it's not trustable at all. At the DA25 level you're starting to see a truer metric.

CF (citation flow from Majestic) is similar. It's based around the number of domains linking in and how many domains those have linking to them.

These two are emulating PR (Page Rank from Google).

TF (trust flow from Majestic) seems to me to be a measure of the distance from a seed set of trusted websites. Let's say W3.org links straight to you. You'll get a huge boost in TF. Let's say W3.org links to Wordpress.org which links to an article on Drupal.org which then links to you. You'll get less of a boost but still huge. If you're 30 leaps away from a seed site you'll have lower TF. And then mix in some calculation on how many different seed sites are close to you and how far.

Ahrefs has a couple metrics I've not bothered to become familiar with.

Majestic has been working with on a Topical Trust Flow metric that attempts to measure niche relevancy. That's all I'd be concerned about. Is the site in your niche or is the article at least related? Then I'll take it. Every site starts low before becoming high. I don't want to miss chances to be in the oldest articles on tomorrow's juiciest websites. Also, they all add to your overall metrics, and if you can use them to dial in your anchor texts too, then why not. Every real site has a lot to offer you with a link.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

I don't look for any metric at all when building for my own projects - I follow your exact approach of finding relevant sites in the niche, or tangentially related niches per my strategy in the crash course chapter I wrote.

I think metrics are just a useful tool for when people outsource linkbuilding they can decide what price they're prepared to pay for 'x' quality on some metric, as @stackcash says, rather than because 1 point lower would be 'garbage' or whatever.

I like AHREFS domain rating better than Moz DA if I do use one, and most of my clients have switched to it, simply because it's faster, and they have a larger index, so you don't end up binning 'up and comer' new sites. It tends to scale a little higher though so I tend to think DR30-35 somewhere is about DA25 but who knows - Moz has so little data in comparison to AHREFS some domains with DA15 can actually be really good, just too new for Moz to pick up on all their data yet.

Anyway ignoring all of that stuff...

Source: https://moz.com/blog/how-guest-bloggers-are-sleepwalking-their-way-into-penalties

If you go and just engineer DAX+ links, you're in danger of a pretty weird link profile developing over time.

My ethos has always been with SEO to think about what high performing, clearly natural sites look like and trying to undertake activities which achieve those outcomes, but on a lower budget and with higher efficiency than 'becoming a huge brand' would take.

Obviously you can take the opposite ethos and be successful (look at what the clearly manipulative, highly successful brands are doing and replicate that more efficiently for yourself...) so I'm not judging that course of action, but you do need to be aware when you're deviating from natural what it might end up looking like, and do what you can to mitigate it if you do go down darker paths to success.

 

[ddasilva]

Honestly, niche relevance trumps metrics in most cases I'd rather have a DA10 on a tightly targeted niche site, than a DA25 on a non-relevant site.

However, not all sites are created equal, which is why metrics are used to price links for most guest post sellers. Using any metric (DA or TF) isn't going to be 100% accurate because it's a 3rd party metric - it's not coming from google itself. Basically an "estimate" of the power of a link, but not the end-all-be-all. In the world of link buys, pricing by DA is going to be pretty standard because it's the most commonly used measurement of a site's power now that PR is extinct, but you should always give it the eye-inspection, as DA can be manipulated rather easily.

If you're doing outreach yourself and not buying posts from an agency, then I wouldn't really worry about DA too much to be honest. Shooting for DA20+ really only comes into play if you're paying per link placement. If you're doing your own outreach, I definitely wouldn't pass up a niche relevant link just because it's a DA of 13.