Domain Authority: is it a big fat lie? With Ross Tavendale (TECHIE)

It’s a term coined by Moz, the SEO software company, and they use it as a metric scale of a site’s ability to rank against its competitors.

But while many swear that the concept of domain authority is real, many more assert that no evidence of its existence exists. In fact, you’ll find the more ranty SEO types getting rather sweaty whenever it’s mentioned. In this episode, I’m talking with Ross Tavendale about domain authority, what it is, why it’s helpful, and if it’s even real.

I’m the head chef here at the Recipe for SEO Success, an online learning hub for all things related to search engine optimization and I love SEO. Today, I’m talking to Ross Tavendale.

Hello, Ross.

Anyway, let’s hear a little bit about Ross. Ross originally cut his teeth in a big box agency dealing with blue chip clients, such as national retail stores and global airlines. Ross, now, is the managing director of Type A Media, a team of SEO consultants based in London, all with type A personalities.

We’ll have to talk about that a little bit. All Type A consultants are told a billable hour is not a billable hour, meaning that it’s not the time you spend on a project that matters, rather your output and results.

Effectiveness equals productivity. They take this very seriously and, as a result, they only work four day weeks, nice, get paid to meditate and work out and get perks like free laundry service provided by the company.

This completely removes distractions and makes them more resilient in the workplace meaning they can focus on what matters, providing world-class service to their clients.

As you know, from listening to previous episodes, we always start with a bit of interesting SEO or marketing-related news that you’ve been reading about this week. So what’s caught your attention this week?

Now without getting too heavy, and too technically SEO, he essentially looked at, literally, if you’re on a blog and you’ve got blog page one, two, three, four, all the way up to however many pages you’ve got, he literally just experimented with adding middle points and adding more numbers to that list to see if it affected crawl rate. And my inner SEO dweeb was very, very happy with it, so I’d highly recommend you go and look at their blog. It was very good, very informative.

You can start cutting, like, even just the interface is nicer. You can cut things up now according to average position and it’s gorgeous. It’s definitely a massive step in the right direction.

I think a lot of the techs out there will probably want, as soon as it gets rolled out to the API, will all be very, very happy. But no, it’s great improvement.

Thank you, Google. Anyway, at least you keep me busy.

Domain authority or DA is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz. And for those of you who don’t know who Moz are, they are a software as a service company based in Seattle who sell SEO software, founded by Rand Fishkin who, as you know, was the first guest on the first episode of the podcast. Thank you very much, Rand.

That’s a score that indicates how the potential that individual page has to rank.

So what that means by logarithmic, gosh, I hate maths, is that it’s significantly easier to grow your score from, say, 20 to 30, then it is to grow from 70 to 80. It gets progressively harder the higher you go up.

So you started off in January with a domain authority of 10, and by August, you’ve got a domain authority of 15, well then, things are going well.

When PageRank kind of died off quite a while ago, there was no quick and dirty way to work out relative value. I’m a much bigger fan of Majestic’s data, Trust Flow and Citation Flow, because I feel it takes in more data points and gives you more accurate representation of what’s going on. But, yeah, I mean, in terms of a metric, yeah, it’s totally fine but it can’t really be used in isolation.

But I think the problem that DA can cause is people get very attached to it, as they do with any metric, you know, people will get obsessed with bounce rate or whatever and, as you said, in isolation going, “Well, I’m going to spend this year working on my domain authority,” I don’t think that’s particularly helpful. It’s a bit of yardstick but I guess the deeper question there is more around link authority.

We’ll pointblank refuse. Reason being is, you know, you said that at the start, DA is a logarithmic scale, it’s not a linear scale, meaning that if you get 10 DA 10 links, it’s not the same as getting one DA 100 link. So a DA 100 link is to the power of 10 multiplied by 10. So actually just getting one or two very good national newspaper or magazine link is way better than getting a handful of blog links. We’ve seen this time and time again with clients where they would have, we’d do a campaign and we’d get four or five really great national press links. They’d go from a couple of keywords in the index to several thousand keywords in the index because it completely shifts the way Google looks at the site.

If you’re a small business, though, I would really treat this the same way that venture capitalists treat investment in start-ups. They’ll invest in 10 start-ups in the year, they only need one to work. It should be the same for your campaigns, in my opinion. If you invest in ten campaigns in the year, you really need two or three of them to work and it will completely change the way your website works and your traffic. Or, at least, that’s what we see with our clients.

They all say that no-follow doesn’t pass page rank. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t pass trust. We all know that Google’s got a seed set of websites that it starts to trove from and the amount of steps away you are from them will indicate relative trust.

Now, if you’re telling me that by getting a link on a Wikipedia page, for example, because you’re an authority in the space and that’s naturally happened, that’s totally worthless or if you’re in a nationally syndicated magazine that just happened to have no-follow on their sites for all external links, that that’s worthless, I think that is utterly insane because you’re close to a trusted source.

Thank you for clarifying that, that’s great.

So they don’t use Moz’s DA or something like it, but they’ll definitely use some level of scoring to look at relative value of links past a page. So we all seen the original paper on page rank and how it passed, of course, it doesn’t work to the same degree like that anymore, but of course, are we trying to say that if we get Bob the Builder and all of this friends to link to your site and then we get the BBC and CNN and the Sydney Herald to link to the same site, that that’s going to be the same thing? Obviously not.

We talked about domain authority and you mentioned several times domain trust, the idea that if you get a link from a trusted domain, some trust will come your way and you came up with a great analogy there, the six degrees of separation, that the closer you are to a trusted source, the kind of more, let’s not call it trust juice, because I don’t want to get back into juice realms, but some trust if not page rank will follow. Can you just clarify what you mean there? Just a little bit more.

Is this on a place, is this on a website that if we look at the website’s back link profile, it’s got a lot of powerful domains pointing to it and if you look at their back link profiles and keep going multiple steps back, it’s all good quality and it’s all pointing up the way. So that’s the raw power thing.

So if we look at the world at large, look at how the banking system works and how money works, there’s a set of criteria that someone’s made up that says, “We trust these things to be true and we’re all going to agree to these rules and that’s how we’re going to act in terms of how currency works,” et cetera.

The same must be true for the way that link equity works, in that they must be able to look at a subset of site that have been around since the dawn of time connected to massive corporations where 90% of the world’s information is consumed and 90% of the clicks in the world happen.

They must be able to look at that and say, “This is probably a good source of what they call trust. Therefore, if anything is linking out from this, regardless if it’s no-follow or not, it’s probably a good thing.” That’s my thoughts on it.

What does that kind of mean for you doing your link building?

So common sense sometimes comes into play.

Let’s finish up talking about link building a little bit. If we decide that, you know, whether we’re going after domain authority or domain trust and we want to try and build ours up, we’re looking at the metric and we’re only at two, we’ve got a domain authority of two and our closest competitor has a domain authority of 30, how do we work towards improving our domain authority?

Just some top-level link earning tips.

What would you recommend to a small business person who doesn’t have a huge amount of resources or a fabulous Type A team working for him or her?

If you’ve got really good micro branding in your world, things can happen. Classic example perhaps, Kate, is this podcast.

I’ve got relatively good micro branding and a tiny little subsection of the search world which has allowed me the privilege of being in this podcast, so, I would ask them to look at that, as well.

A little bit of quirk never goes amiss, as well. I think that’s really powerful.

Another thing you can do is write a blog post about how to get back links, go on a podcast and mention it, and then the podcast will link to it, because they have to, because he’s mentioned it. So I will link to Ross’ podcast about slaying, killing giants in the show notes. You can go off and read how they’ve done that. So that’s a little trick, as well.

Start thinking of yourself as someone, think of like how can I make my business famous in my own little way and I’d start building your ideas like that because one thing, the partly message for me is the press at the moment have got bad incentives.

They’re paid on a CPM rate, meaning that every thousand views they get a couple of quid and because of that, they’ll do anything for the click.

That’s why we’ve seen the rise of all these kind of Facebook pages and all this kind of junk journalism. We hire journalists all the time to do our PR and they need to write eight to 12 articles a day.

They’re looking for anything that’s kind of micro-related to their audience so jump in, go for the high end stuff, and I think you’ll be very surprised at how quickly it works out for you.