What is Domain Authority?
What is domain authority, how does it relate to your website or blog and why is it important to be aware of its significance in the grand scheme of the Internet?
There are millions of websites in existence and they all have certain aspects that either make them worthwhile to visit or best stayed away from altogether.
It's an unfortunate fact that the vast majority of published web pages are either duplicated from other sources, lacking in useful content or outright illegible junk.
To be able to separate the good from the bad, people need to have some kind of filter that lets the good ones through while keeping the bad ones out of the way.
Fortunately, we have such a system in operation thanks to the search engines. Google in particular has been at the forefront of filtering out the junk and showing us the sites (in their search index) that provide topical value, factual content and safety from malware.
Useful Websites
Well, first of all domain authority is a value that is given to a domain by Google (and other search engines) that has shown itself to be trustworthy, is informative and relevant to its niche or main keywords and provides the visitor with what is considered by the search engines as a good user experience.
If you are a website owner, you'll probably already be aware of how your site is rated by Google, by where it is placed in the search index for keywords related to its pages.
How it relates to this site (Bake Radio) is an ongoing project that aims to achieve exactly that for this domain as a money making blog and website. I'll explain how that can happen.
Age Before Beauty?
For a domain to achieve authority status in the first place, it needs to have some age behind it to begin with and then must provide its visitors with a worthwhile experience while they are on its pages.
So, say a person was looking up information on a top Internet marketing training program like John Thornhill's Ambassador program and they found the page here among the Work from Home category pages. When they landed on that page and they were provided with a good, informative and well written article on the subject, they would go away happy that they'd found what they were looking for.
This is a good user experience and one which, when Google likes your website, it wants people who use its index to get when they click on sites listed in there. If, on the other hand they landed on a page that contained little or no useful information buried inside a page full of ads, that would be a bad user experience and one that would reflect badly on Google's index.
A site like that would not be welcome in their index and they are working constantly to eradicate any listings of those types of websites.
How Good is Your Site?
So getting back to domain authority, how useful or user-friendly is your website and how visible is it in the search engines indices?
If your site can provide lots of well written, informative articles targeted to either the main keywords that are relevant to the domain, or to the categories set up in a more general themed domain, then Google will look upon that site as being exactly what they want to be found in their index.
Add to the mix other established and well respected websites that regard your site as worthwhile and relevant to their own linking to your articles and your domain is then deemed by Google as being an authority in its niche.
This is what I'm working toward with Bake Radio as I create more pages with good, original, informative and relevant articles. The more content I create, the bigger the site becomes and the more likely that other site owners will link to my articles because they are worthwhile and useful.
Summary
While a perfect world doesn't yet exist in the realm of search engine listings, particularly that of Google, it is a lot better than it was several years ago.
A lot of the outright junk has been removed from the index and what's left is a collection of more or less useful pages of content that offer some value, are at least on-topic and readable.
It's good news for the many basically honest affiliate marketers who rely on search engine visibility to maintain their income from the Internet. It's bad news for spammers who produce often illegible junk in great quantities in the hope of tricking search engine visitors into clicking their sites.
Growing a website with useful, accurate and entertaining content is a necessary process for any site owner who wants their site to grow and become established as an authority on whatever subject or subjects they choose to become an authority on.
Originally Posted: January 16, 2009
Last Updated: February 3, 2024
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