How to increase domain authority after recent update

[EugeneComputerG]

What is the best way to increase domain authority? What are the likely factors that make up domain authority?

After the recent Google update, it seems Google is giving a lot more prevalence towards sites with a high DA.

Other than time, and high quality backlinks, is there anything else one can do to improve DA? What about internal linking? I know it sounds like a dumb question, but would pointing to the home page from authoritative pages internally help DA in anyway?

Like a lot of you here, I noticed a drop in rankings on Sep 28th. I guess I should be thankful it wasn't a lot worse. For a lot of my best search terms, I went from ranked #1 to #2, but then noticed after a couple days went back to #1.

On my money making term, "Computer Repair E***ne Ore**n" I dropped from #1 to #2. After reading into this I believe it has to do with my site having a low domain authority. Our competitor has much less quality content than I do, but has a few really good incoming links which has made his domain authority slightly higher. (He's also been around a lot longer than me).

Our site gets way more traffic, and we provide useful free services that get people staying on the site, and back for more. I've focused almost entirely on content building and providing useful free services on our site. This has gotten us some natural incoming links but not from very many high quality sites. The extent of link building I've done is a few guest posts on authoritative blogs, which hasn't seemed to help much, other than drive in some traffic. (maybe it just takes time)

Should I do more guest blogging? Or should I keep focusing on content, content, content, and hope natural links come, which will in turn improve DA?

[DarrenHaye]

I have to say..

Where are you getting this info from? SEOMoz.. they aren't google, so I wouldn't look too deeply into that.

You shouldn't create content then hope, you should create content and then market it to the people who you want links from.

You can even go as far as to look into what sites you want links from, look at what they link out to, then try and create something with them in mind.

After saying all this.. I can't imagine your keyword is overly difficult so you aren't going to need to set the world alight with too many good links to get back to where you want.

[EugeneComputerG]

I have to say..

Where are you getting this info from? SEOMoz.. they aren't google, so I wouldn't look too deeply into that.

You shouldn't create content then hope, you should create content and then market it to the people who you want links from.

You can even go as far as to look into what sites you want links from, look at what they link out to, then try and create something with them in mind.

After saying all this.. I can't imagine your keyword is overly difficult so you aren't going to need to set the world alight with too many good links to get back to where you want.

Thanks, That's what I'll try next. (Write content and market it to sites I want the link from)

[Dice79]

The Term "Domain Authority" is difficult to pin point and is subjective as Mr Haye pointed out. Many SEO's believe that it does exist and that sites with "Authority" can drive ranks based on the power of the domain alone. Primarily from internal link juice.

My opinion, Domain Authority does exist. Based on Topic Relevance. This is how sites like Wikipedia, Amazon and other large sites can rank for pages that are buried deep in their site with little or Zero backlinks to the page that ranks for a certain term.

In essence, these "Authoritive" Sites gain that authority via external links primary to their homepage. You can argue that "Authority" is synonymous with "Quality".

So you were on the right track. To gain "Authority" for your term you need "Quality" backlinks to your site.

[richamor]

It’s true that higher authority domain will be indexed quicker than less. I've tested it. I created an article on a domain that have better domain authority, and in 2-3 days, the page indexed on page 3, then 2 in a couple hours next.

[ALorenzo]

Domain authority isn't an official Google score, it's a score generated by SEOMoz on a number of factors some of which are discussed here Domain Authority - Best Practices for SEO | SEOmoz and it's a "likely indicator" of how well you'll rank against competing sites for a keyword. The domain authority score is updated every 4-6 weeks, but that's no indicator of how Google is ranking/judging your site. I'd monitor the site and keyword traffic with Webmaster tools and analytics to plan where I need to be.

When checking search results, make sure you have customized search turned off. A switch between 1 and 2 with personalized search turned on could mean you searched, clicked on your competitor to check them out and Google think's that's your preferred result and will return it with a higher rank on the same or similar search in the future.

Don't base everything on rank, compare rank against any drop in visitors or any drop in sales/interaction conversions. SEO shouldn't be the cornerstone of a marketing plan.

In terms of content vs guest posting, it's common sense. Content fuels discovery and returning visitors (I'd hope you'd have analytics for this) while guest blogging fuels discovery with the nice bonus of a juicy backlink and a network connection with a person who holds power to influence your niche (which makes blog owners more likely to create curated blog posts pointing to your content, to tweet your links and so on). Figure out where you're weak and plan from there.