Ever wondered what Domain Authority (DA) is and more importantly, what your Domain Authority score means? This blog will help you to understand what Domain Authority is, as well as some of the factors that can have an impact on your site’s DA. In addition, we will give you 5 free Domain Authority checker tools to help you get started on analysing your Domain Authority today. These tools can be used to find out the DA of your and your competitor’s websites. Some of these free tools even have added extras that can help to enhance your SEO efforts.
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What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority (also known as DA) was developed by Moz to predict the likelihood of a website ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). The website is allocated a score of between 1 to 100, with higher scores correlating to a greater likelihood of ranking on SERPs. However, it is notable that DA is NOT a Google ranking factor and has no effect on the SERPs.
How is Domain Authority worked out?
DA score is calculated using a machine learning algorithm. While this list is not exhaustive, here are a few things that can have an impact on DA:
- Quality of backlinks – You want the site to have a medium to high DA to help your site rank better.
- Number of backlinks – the more the better but you want them to be of high quality and not spam.
- Age of domain – this is when the domain first went live on Google.
- Website speed – Does your site load quickly and efficiently?
- Quality of content on the site – Is the content of high quality? To ensure you are producing high-quality work, check out the Google Helpful Content update.
How to check Domain Authority for free
There are several excellent and free tools out there that you can use to assess the DA of your site. Each site is slightly different in its offering, some for instance also include a keyword report, while others will offer a backlink report. All of these are excellent tools which can help you grow your website. In addition, some of these sites also offer a paid version which gives you many more metrics that you can track and use to optimise your website.
LOCALiQ Top Tip: “You can use a DA tool not just to analyse your website, but to analyse your competitors too!”
Top 5 free Domain Authority Checkers:
1. Moz
You can access Moz via their website or even install the Moz plugin. With the Moz plugin, you get extremely basic information: namely the DA, Page Authority (PA) and spam score of a website.
If you use the Moz website to assess a website, you will have more metrics to view. You will get the standard DA and PA of the website, but there are heaps more metrics into which you can delve. As we know how important linking domains are when it comes to DA, Moz also offers you a list of top linking domains and their DA. Moz also offers some keyword analysis based on estimated clicks, top-ranked keywords, branded keywords, and featured snippets. Lastly, Moz offers insights into what it deems are your top competitors.
Moz offers both a free and paid version of its analytics. However, even with the free version, you can access plenty of data such as those mentioned above.
Image: Screenshot of DA on Moz
2. SEMrush
SEMrush has a free and paid version. With a free account, you are limited to 10 searches a day, and for certain aspects, you will only get 10 results per search.
Our advice would be to make a list and know what you want to search for and how to perform the search to maximise the amount of data you receive with a free account. When you are looking at your DA, take some time to look at the side bar and perform a backlink analysis. You can even compare your results with competitors.
Image: Screenshot of DA on SEMrush
The Domain analysis on SEMrush allows you to spend time assessing the backlinks, including the authority score of referring domains. Another feature we particularly like is top link-building opportunities. This can be a fantastic way to generate more backlinks and improve your DA score.
3. Ahrefs
Ahrefs use a slightly different method to assess your DA or as they call it, Domain Rating. They calculate Domain Rating in the following ways:
- Number of unique domains that link to the website.
- Assess the pre-existing rankings of those websites.
- Track how many unique sites the domain links to.
Unlike most other tools, Ahrefs does not assess spam score, domain age or pre-existing traffic to determine its Domain Rating.
Image – screenshot of Domain Rating on Ahrefs.
As you can see, Ahrefs give a higher domain rating than other sites give for DA. There are also limited additional metrics for you to analyse than on other sites.
4. SEO Review Tools
SEO Review Tools operates a basic checker that only requires your website. You get a DA score as well as a Page Authority score and external links. When you click on the external links you have access to the following as well as a more detailed backlink result which includes your top backlinks and their DA.
Image: Screenshot of DA on SEO Review Tools
This site offers plenty of extra tools you can access for free, 61 free tools in fact! The tools are excellent for SEO and include functions such as SERP analysis, Google Keyword tool and broken link checker. There are also webmaster tools such as schema generator, accessibility checker and mobile-friendly test tool.
5. Small SEO Tools
Small SEO tools are basic DA checkers, offering you domain authority and page authority. The site itself has quite a few ads on it, however, this does not impact its usability. There are other tools that you can use which analyse text. There is a word count of 1000, so would suit shorter-form content, however, you can pay to have this as an unlimited service.
Image: Domain Authority on Small SEO Tools.
There are hundreds of DA tools out there and each one varies in its capabilities. We have chosen 5 that we think are the best you can get and offer a variety of other tools that can help you with your website.
We hope you have enjoyed this article and have found some good DA tools to use for your website. If you need any help with any aspect of your website, SEO or indeed anything related to marketing, feel free to contact us today for a free marketing consultation.
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