What is Website Authority?
Website authority is an estimate of how reputable and influential a website is. The higher a site’s website authority, the higher its likelihood of appearing in search results and the more trust, traffic, and visibility it receives.
A highly authoritative site will usually have many backlinks from similar high-authority sites. Similarly, it will also link to other highly authoritative sites.
Receiving a backlink from a high-authority site is always good news as it indicates that your content is helpful enough to be linked to. This, in turn, passes high-quality link equity and PageRank to your site and increases the trust search engines have in your site.
Is Website Authority a Metric?
Website authority is not a metric. Instead, it is a concept and method bloggers use to determine the SEO strength of a website. SEO tools typically have different names for the metrics used to determine the website authority of a site.
For example, Moz evaluates website authority using the Domain Authority metric. Other SEO tools have different names for the metrics used to evaluate a site’s authority. These names are often trademarked and will be unique to that tool.
The specific techniques for calculating the website authority differ from tool to tool. However, the backlink profile usually plays a significant role. The more high-quality backlinks a website has, the higher its website authority.
Importance of Website Authority
Google has a metric called PageRank, which it uses to determine the authority to assign to a page. However, Google does not appear to have a similar metric that applies to the entire site. So, it is difficult for bloggers to evaluate their site’s authority.
This prompted multiple SEO tools to devise metrics to determine a site’s authority. That said, it is crucial to know that Google does not use any of these website authority metrics, including Domain Authority. So, an improvement in those metrics does not necessarily mean an improvement in your rankings.
How to Improve Your Website Authority
You can improve your website authority by creating helpful content and getting high-quality backlinks pointing to it.
Most tools that evaluate the domain authority typically review the site’s backlink profile. Some tools may also consider other factors, including the amount of webspam on your site and your current Google rankings. However, backlinks play a vital role in evaluating your website authority.
In all, you should also ensure that your site and content are properly optimized for on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. If you want to rank for local keywords, then optimize your site for local SEO too. You should avoid black hat SEO techniques because they may get you penalized and would affect your website authority.