Domain authority, whether or not is something Google has or not, is an important concept to take note of. Essentially Google ‘trusts’ some websites more than others and you will find that it is easier to rank using some websites than it is others.

SEOs conveniently call this effect ‘domain authority’ and it seemed to be related to ‘PageRank’ – the system Google started to rank the web within 1998.

Domain authority is an important ranking phenomenon in Google. Nobody knows exactly how Google calculates, ranks and rates the popularity, reputation, intent or trust of a website, outside of Google, but when I write about domain authority I am generally thinking of sites that are popular, reputable and trusted – all of which can be faked, of course.

It’s a useful metaphor and proxy for quality and sometimes you can use it to work out the likelihood of a site ranking for a particular keyword based on its relative score when compared to competing sites and pages.

Historically sites that had domain authority or online business authority had lots of links to them, hence why link building was so popular a tactic – and counting these links is generally how most 3rd party tools still calculate it a pseudo domain authority score for websites today.

Massive domain authority and ranking ‘trust’ was awarded to very successful sites that had gained a lot of links from credible sources, and other online business authorities too.

QUOTE: “So domain authority is kind of a theme picked up by SEO companies or SEO tools. So it’s not really something that we have here at Google.” John Mueller, Google 2017

QUOTE: “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.” Google