9 Best Ways To Increase Your Domain Authority in 2023

By Rob Powell
Last update:

If you’re looking for ways to increase your domain authority (DA), you probably know that DA is one of the metrics that people use when they assess the value and importance of your website.

DA is not a metric used by Google and it probably doesn’t have any direct impact on how your pages rank. But it does measure the quality and quantity of websites that link to your website.

Although some regard DA as a ‘vanity metric’, the fact is it’s the go-to measure that a lot of people use to assess your website.

And that’s why people spend so much effort trying to improve their DA.

In this article, you’ll learn nine ways to increase your domain authority.

Contents
  1. What Is Domain Authority?
  2. How To Find Your Domain Authority
  3. #1. Publish Detailed, Long-Form Content
  4. #2. Write 'Top List' Posts
  5. #3. Write Expert Roundup Posts
  6. #4. Write for HARO
  7. #5. Buy An Aged Domain
  8. #6. Make Your Website Faster
  9. #7. Remove Toxic Backlinks
  10. #8. Publish More Frequently
  11. #9. Be Careful Who You Link To
  12. Conclusion
  13. More Articles About SEO Metrics

But before we get started, how much domain authority do you need?

Not much. I started ranking on Page #1 of Google with a domain authority of just 25:

how much DA do you need to rank on Google

Before we go any further, what exactly is domain authority?

What Is Domain Authority?

DA is a metric on a scale of 10 to 100, created by Moz, that predicts a website’s performance in search engine rankings.

Here are some key facts about domain authority:

  • DA rank is based on over 40 factors, including (1) the number of links pointing to your site from other websites, (2) the Domain Authority of those sites that link to your site, and (3) the age of your website.
  • Although Domain Authority is not a concept or term that Google uses, the Google algorithm takes these factors into account when deciding how to rank a web page.
  • Because DA is a logarithmic scale, each increment represents an increase by a factor of 10 rather than by equal increments
  • For this reason, it is much easier to go from a DA of 10 to a DA of 30 than it is to go from a DA of 70 to a DA of 80

How To Find Your Domain Authority

To see the DA of your own or any other website, simply install  MozBar, the free Chrome Extension.

Once you’ve activated your free Moz account, the MozBar will display a small black box with a blue bar. Inside that box is a number that shows the Domain Authority of the site you’re currently visiting.

In the screenshot below, MozBar shows a DA of 100 for Wikipedia:

How to increase your domain authority

Nine Techniques For Building Your Domain Authority

#1. Publish Detailed, Long-Form Content

To raise your domain authority, you want people linking to your content.

And the content that gets linked to most is detailed, well-researched articles.

Definitive Guides, Tutorials, and Case Studies are examples of content that gets linked to by high authority websites.

So focus on publishing those kind of articles.

#2. Write ‘Top List’ Posts

Another way to increase your domain authority is to write ‘Top List’ posts. These are articles that list the top players in a particular field. Here are some examples:

The key with top lists posts is the number in the title.

People love seeing that they were ranked in the top 50 or the top 25.

So don’t title your article the ‘Top Fitness Blogs to Follow in 2019’. That won’t cut it.

Once your article is live, contact the experts/celebrities/gurus that you listed and let them know they were mentioned.

About half of them will either post a link to your article on their website or share your article on social media. Either way, that’s going to raise your domain authority.

And remember: these key players in your niche have websites with high DA, so if you get a link from them, your DA could easily jump 5 levels.

#3. Write Expert Roundup Posts

Expert Roundup posts work on the same principle as ‘Top List’ posts.

People love seeing themselves ranked with the top players in their field. It’s just human nature.

And they want other people to know about it.

So they’ll  link to your Expert Roundup on their website. Or they’ll share it on social media.

Either way, it’s going to boost your domain authority.

For tips on how to write expert roundup posts, see my article: The Definitive Guide to Writing Roundup Posts That Go Viral.

#4. Write for HARO

Writing for HARO is another excellent way to increase your domain authority. I call this ‘micro guest blogging’. It’s like guest posting, but with a difference:

  • it’s a fraction of the effort (100-200 words as opposed to 1000-2000 words)
  • the publishers come looking for you (with guest blogging it’s the other way around)

Just go to HARO and sign up to become a reporter. You’ll get an email notification three times a day, listing websites that want contributors.

#5. Buy An Aged Domain

Why start at zero? You can buy a domain that already has domain authority.

If the aged domain has good DA this technique can save you 6 to 12 months. 

Another strategy is to buy an aged domain and point it at your brand new domain. The new domain  acquires domain authority of the aged domain.

For an excellent introduction to buying and using aged domains, read Brandon Gaille’s The Right Domain Name Strategy Can Make or Break Your Blog.

#6. Make Your Website Faster

Since the July 2018 Speed Update, Google is rewarding sites that load in less than 1 second.

This is another way to increase your domain authority.

Page loading time also affects user experience. If your page is slow to load, the visitor clicks back to the search results. Better user experience results in higher domain authority.

For tips on how to make your site faster, see my article: 27 Easy Ways to Reduce Server Response Time in WordPress.

Toxic backlinks will prevent your website from gaining domain authority.

To keep track of toxic backlinks, use a backlink checking tool like Monitor Backlinks. This tool picks up new links to your website and tells you which links are harming your link profile.

Typically, these links come from web pages that:

  • are not indexed in Google
  • have low Majestic Trust Flow
  • have a high number of external links (>100)
  • use unnatural anchor text
  • have spammy looking domain names, containing numbers and dots

The acid test is to visit the site that’s linking to you. You’ll see straight away whether or not it’s a legitimate website.

Ideally you should approach the source of the toxic link and ask them to remove it.

But that’s time-consuming. Also, the offending website is unlikely to oblige. They may even want to charge you to have the bad link removed.

So, the next best thing is to use Google’s Disavow Tool.

MonitorBacklinks compiles a disavow file containing your bad backlinks. You submit that file to the Google disavow tool

#8. Publish More Frequently

Domain Authority is relative: it’s a measure of your website against other websites. And that’s why the rate at which you publish new content comes into play.

If your competitors are adding two new articles a week and your website publishes one new article a month, your DA is going to be lower than theirs.

So try to increase your publication output and frequency.

Another way to increase your domain authority is to make sure you don’t link to ‘dodgy’ websites.

Linking out to websites that have been flagged for using black hat link building can have an adverse effect on your domain authority. Be very careful who you link to. 

In particular, never engage in any kind of reciprocal link building, however indirect. The websites that go in for this kind of link building will eventually be flagged by the algorithms, and that will damage your website’s domain authority.

Conclusion

Domain authority is not a metric that Google recognizes so it won’t directly affect how your pages rank in the search results.

But it is used by other websites to gauge the importance and value of your website. So having a high DA is valuable for building relationships with other websites.

Follow these any of these nine techniques to increase your domain authority and you’ll eventually see your DA score increase.

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AUTHOR
Rob Powell
Rob Powell shares the traffic building techniques that are working for him. Join him as he 'cracks the safe' on search engine traffic for bloggers - find out what works (and what doesn't).

37 thoughts on “9 Best Ways To Increase Your Domain Authority in 2023”

  1. This is great post that I have been searching online and researching on for the past weeks and I happy you have written a quality content on it. I am working on a list of 100 websites that could boost one’s domain authority and getting links from these sites does not require any outreach. Thanks for sharing this great piece of asset.

  5. To achieve a good SEO result one needs to see the trust a website also gets. No matter what your content is, you need to have a good reputation of your website also. You need to get the website’s score to be good in numbers and citation flow. Here are some tips for the increase in your DA PA and increase DA for your business

  6. Thanks for the comment. I agree – the quality of the content is only part of the equation. Trust flow and Citation flow are also relevant factors. Regards, Rob.

  7. Hi Rob,

    Domain authority is one of the most talked metrics to measure the authority of a website or blog. To increase domain authority one should focus on overall performance of the content and website. Improve technical SEO, and do everything to make the site user friendly.

    Thanks for sharing all the value-able points.

  8. Hi Gaurav,

    Thanks for your comment. You’re quite right: DA and relevance of content are the two key factors in SEO right now.

    Best regards,
    Rob.

  9. I am struggling for 2 months to increase DA of my blog but I could not foundd such valuable knowledge which you shared with us Thanks

  11. Thanks greatly Bob. I am an upcoming blogger and I have found this information highly profitable

  15. Hi I have a domain that’s only a few months old my domain authority is very low. Great article I’m going try to increase my DA with your steps

  17. Most of the information you shared, thanks … I used SEO all the techniques, but the ahref domain score did not increase at 2.8 stopped, what is their solution, you tell me.

  18. Hi Dharmesh,

    Thanks for your question. Your Moz domain authority is currently 19. I’m not sure what the number 2.8 refers to. One way you could improve your domain authority is to make your website load faster. I ran a test on your domain and it loaded in 2.8 seconds, which is not bad. But Google gives preference to sites that load in less than 1 second. So, if you can reduce your site load time, that will make your pages rank higher in the search results. And that, in turn, will raise your domain authority.

    Hope this helps,
    Rob

  19. I am not talking about moz, I want to say about Ahref tools, I had seen a few days ago, then 2.8 was a domain rating and today gave 3.5 domain rating, this is ahrefs domain rating is low How can increase.

  20. Hi Dharmesh,

    I’m not sure that the number you refer to is an Ahrefs domain rating. The Ahrefs domain rating is a whole number, as in this example:

    Ahrefs domain rating

    I would suggest contacting the team at Ahrefs to find out what that 2.8 number refers to.

    Best,
    Rob.

  22. Thanks for sharing this. I love creating top 10 lists and i also do my best to remove toxic links. It is difficult to increase DA but your guide has shed some light on the path.

  24. Rob,

    Thanks for the ideas to improve the site’s domain authority. Hope you can help on these as well: One of my site’s DA declined from 15 to 11 in March when MOZ revised its DA algorithm (Domain Authority 2.0). That I understood, but recently, it again comes down to 9. What might be the reason now? Does the blog post publishing frquency affects DA? Because I couldn’t publish blog posts in that site more often. What are the reasons for the decline in domain authority?

  25. Hi Rob,
    I have a website which acquired thousands of toxic backlinks after I added a forum. I am now stuck on how to remove these. I once tried the Google disavow tool but got stuck along the way. I will give it another try and get in touch in case I need more assistance. Might you have a detailed post that explains how to handle the bad backlinks and how to stop getting new ones?

    Thanks
    Amos

  26. Hi Jenna,

    Thanks for your question.

    Moz completely recalibrated their Domain Authority scale on 5th March this year, so the first adjustment would have been due to that.

    The second adjustment might have been to do with their periodic updates.

    If your DA score is falling, my first guess would be it has something to do with your link profile. Here are some links that may help you understand what’s happened and how to recover your DA score:

    https://moz.com/domain-authority-2.0
    Why My Domain Authority Dropped | SEO Q&A | Moz
    Why my Domain Authority is Drop from 36 to 29? | SEO Q&A | Moz
    Why my Domain Authority (DA) is Decreased | SEO Q&A | Moz
    Domain Authority Has Changed. Don’t Panic, Here’s How to Boost It

    I hope this helps,

    Rob

  29. Hi Amos,

    I use MonitorBacklinks to identify toxic backlinks. MB then creates a file that I can download to my desktop. I then upload that file to the Google Disavow Tool. I really recommend you disavow those 1000’s of bad backlinks ’cause they will hurt you. Here a video on how use Ahrefs and the Disavow Tool to disown toxic backlinks: https://youtu.be/l72XPkdgAo4

    Hope it helps, Rob.

  30. Wow thanks for these tips. I think I have a good site but since it is new I need to work on a lot things. Thanks for the speed tips. I just dropped from 8.5 seconds to 3.7 with a plugin and about 30 mins work! 🙂

  36. Hi Rob,
    It’s an amazing post, I am searching again and again for How to increase DA. But Alas I am hopeless. But finally, I got it. It’s you, this is the best article for increasing DA. Thank you very much and please write more one article how to increase PA.

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