Measuring and checking domain authority

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Several roads lead to Rome. So too to measure the Domain Authority of your website.  Through the Link Explorer of Moz and SmallSEOtools you can measure and check the Domain Authority. Below are the pros and cons of both SEO tools.

Moz

The publisher of this statistic, Moz, gives you a free 30-day subscription to check the Domain Authority of your website.  The tool also allows you to check the authority of a particular page. The authority of a certain page (www.domain.com/page/) is different than the Domain Authority.

Moz offers, besides checking the authority, also other possibilities. You can also use the tool to make analyses of different domains / pages in terms of Domain and Page Authority. So you can easily compare the authority of your own domain with the authority of your closest competitors.

When you want in-depth information, such as where the backlinks come from, which backlinks point to the competitor, which lost and new backlinks were found within a certain time period, or draw a comparison of your own website with the competitor's website, we do recommend it. The big advantage of Moz is that you can make a comparison on page level with competitor's pages.

SmallSEOtools

To find out the DA score, you can use not only the tool of Moz, but also the tool of SmallSEOtools. If you only want to gain insight into the Domain or Page Authority, we recommend using SmallSEOtools. This is a free tool, where you can see the values without registering.

The big advantage of this site is that it is free and you do not need to create an account to use it. This saves you time and money. As a test we used the Domain Authority of several websites with the DA-checker of SmallSEOtools and Moz. The results are the same in all cases.

It is even possible with this tool to make bulk exports of multiple domains. So you can also scrutinize your competitor's domain. The disadvantage of this tool is that it does not provide in-depth info about how this Domain Authority was established.

In short: if you subscribe to Moz, it must have added value. Only checking the Domain Authority is no added value and a waste of money. For in-depth competitor research, we recommend this tool.

Increase domain authority

The Domain Authority is mainly increased with link building. It is important that you acquire a backlink from a (relevant) website with a high Domain Authority. The website you get the referral from, passes on value to your website.

Domain authority is manipulative

There have been plenty of studies in the link building world about the ways in which Domain Authority can be manipulated.

Anno 2021, there are many cowboy companies that will ''boost'' your website's Domain Authority for a pittance within a month or two. They then increase the Domain Authority in a very unnatural way. Think of an increase from 1 to 34.

The referring domains you get in many cases are from Google, not earned and manually placed. For the purpose of sustainable link building, Google may eventually penalize this causing your domain to not rank or to rank less well for keywords in Google.

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