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Improve Domain Authority for a Better Blog Ranking

Posted By Guest Blogger 27th of March 2011 Blog Promotion 0 Comments

This guest post is by R Kumar of dkspeaks.com.

One of the major sources of traffic for any blog today is organic traffic. While SEO is one of the major factors influencing organic search engine results, there is another aspect to this whole story which is often ignored. All of the efforts go into building links, and in doing that, we ignore this critical aspect.

If you are wondering what this aspect is, it’s domain trust and authority. In order for you newer content to be ranked well on Google, it is important that you build both domain trust and domain authority. Otherwise, your already established home page will get a few rankings, but your new content will seldom see good rankings.

For people who do not know what domain trust and authority is, let me explain these concepts.

Domain authority

Explained in simple terms, domain authority is about how many quality pages link to your domain, and how they link to you.

Improving domain authority can involve more than one task. You will not have to change the way you optimize your blog or, follow a different approach all together. Instead, all you have to do is change your process a bit.

Link juice

Like every other person working on building links, I used to comment, write articles, and exchange links with a link to my home page on the anchor text. Things didn’t move until I read an article on building diverse links to the same domain.

I changed my focus and started building links with relevant anchor texts to other pages in the blog. In doing so, I was building a lot of links to my domain name—not just to a single page. Results were good. My domain started to feature for a lot of high-search keywords on almost all the search engines.

When I mention linking and links here, it is not the number of links to a particular page on your blog that I’m talking about. Instead, it’s the number of links to your domain. So, how many links your domain gets as a whole is of extreme importance. At the same time, it’s also important that the links be from other domains and pages that have fewer outbound links from them.

Deep linking

When I built links to the inner pages on my blog, I didn’t realize initially that there was something else that I was doing at the same time.

I was telling the search engines that even the inner pages on my blog had valuable content, and that it should be ranked, too. Gradually I found that my inner pages were getting ranked on search engines. What this also did was ensure that my newest post was ranked much sooner that it was before I started this exercise.

It is not just important to build links. It is important to build deep links. The normal tendency when you build links is to build links to a particular page on your blog; usually it is the home page. We do everything including working on our anchor text, but we forget the fact that in order for us to build trust in the eyes of a search engine, we should have links pointing deep into the blog’s individual pages. Building trust into each of these pages will help build authority around your domain.

Diverse linking

Commenting on do-follow blogs is said to be a good way to obtain links. So people pick a handful of such blogs and keep commenting on them. I, too, did the same. But did this help? Absolutely not! I was creating links from the same domain again and again. Search engines were not impressed, because there was no diversity among those links.

I decided that I should deviate from the norm and do something different. I started building links from all kinds of domains—.org, .info, .edu, .net, .co.in, and so on. The domains were diverse and I did not restrict myself to the handful of do-follow blogs. It took a lot of hard work, but the results were slowly becoming evident. My blog moved up the search engine ranks much faster than I expected.

While the number of links to your domain is important, the kinds of domains that you’re getting these links from is also very important. The more diverse the domains, the better those links are for your domain authority. Hence it is important that you work on striking a balance between the number of links and the diversity of the domains that you are getting the links from.

Domain trust

It is important that the search engines trust that your domain provides value to visitors. It is only then that they will be interested in showing your latest content in their search results. But how is it that you will build this trust?

In order to build this trust, you need to ensure that you do not get involved in any kind of unethical practices. Unethical link building can prove disastrous to your blog.

Linking is one the biggest factors that influence how trustworthy your domain is seen to be.

The frequency of acquiring links, and the quality of the domains that are linking to you are, also equally important. If your new blog acquires a thousand links in just two or three days, it will not be difficult for Google to understand that there is something fishy going on. You can even be banned for spamming. At the same time, if the links you are getting are all from domains that are involved in spamming, the chances are that your domain will also be considered spammy.

You’ll likely receive emails that come from people claiming to be SEO experts for companies, requesting link exchanges. They would be ready to give you links from domains that they say have good PageRank. But It is important that you verify and check the quality of the domain and the PageRank before you accept the request—there are a lot of websites that can help you detect blogs and websites with fake PageRank. The fake page rank detection tool at http://www.build-reciprocal-links.com/fake-rank-checker/ is one I use.

While the kinds of domains that you’re getting links from is important, it is also important to ensure that you do not link to any of these spammy domains. Since you have full control of your site and what shows up on it, linking to a spammy domain can be even worse than getting links from them.

If you can work on building domain trust and thus improve your domain authority, you will be able to get your latest content to appear on search engine results. What experiences have you had with these concepts as you’ve built links for your blog? Share them with us in the comments.

R Kumar is a blogger and Affiliate marketer. You can read more about Internet Entrepreneurship at his blog and subscribe to the RSS feeds to remain updated, or download his Internet marketing package.

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Comments
  1. Awesome write up man. Learnt a lot from this. I knew Diverse linking is imp., but linking from diff. tld’s is something new to me.

  2. Domain Authority, inbound links, etc are all good.
    But too often I see webmasters and SEO Proffesionals place too much emphasis on this.
    So much so that they loose the plot of quality content.
    This fascination about inbound links breeds a culture of what I like to call “Link Harrasment”, Where people continuely harras you for link juice.

    Links are supost to be natural. By that I mean, you link to me because you think I have something to add to your blog /page/ website. Not because you begged, borrowed, stole or paid for that link.

    • Great point, Robert.

      Focus on creating great content … not begging strangers for links. You can’t control whether or not people link to you – which is why Google depends so heavily on inbound links, – but you can increase your chances of someone linking to your content by spending time creating it.

      I’m not saying link-building is useless. It can be helpful for professionals to conduct competitive link research and then reach out to those people and connect.

      I’m just saying this isn’t like building Legos.

      In regard to link diversity, Google made it clear they’re now taking into account social links, such as tweets and re-tweets, so again, focus on creating solid content people want to link to and share with their friends and following.

      There’s a reason why Google depends on links to determine authority … it’s hard for publishers to game and it’s easy for them to see when we’re trying.

      A good rule of thumb: If you think you’re being clever or you’ve found a side door or you’ve found an easy alternative … chances are you’re efforts aren’t going to make a difference.

      Building links is hard, because it requires you to get creative and make something awesome … something people want to share.

  3. Great Post! I want to mention that it is also important to have a small number if no-follow links pointing to your website as well. It looks unnatural for the search engines if you only have perfect do-follow links with the exact anchor text..

    Best,
    David

  4. And this is why I focus exclusively on guest posting to build links – niche targeted, authoritative, and in-content links are as good as it gets in the eyes of search engines.

  5. Once again, I’ve learned something very valuable that I didn’t even know should be on my radar. Thanks Darren for the guest post. Great info. I especially found the point about following sites of different domains. Now I just need to figure out what “do follow” is :)

  6. Thanks for this most informative post.

    I’m not sure I follow what you mean by “building links from all kinds of domains—.org, .info, .edu, .net, .co.in, and so on.” Could you please clarify how one would go about doing this?

    Thanks,
    Dorlee

  7. Nice thoughts Kumar.

    But when you mention about building backlinks from .edu domains, great care should be taken in checking the quality of the site. Recently some big fish got penalized because of doing some black hat trick with .edu backlinks. Consequently links from .edu are not as authoritative as it used to be in Google’s eyes.

    Jane.

  8. When I first started my website, I did a real world promotion with an advertiser I use. The promotion was pretty much a flop but they asked me if I wanted to get linked from their website resource section. This is when I had a placeholder site.

    Next I forgot about my website, and concentrated on my business. Three years later I set up a blog on that site. By accident I had developed some nice authority. I only looked into it once someone told me hey you have a pagerank of 4. I had no idea what they were talking about.

    The trick is time x link

    • I also believe TIME is a very important factor. I have a website that I haven’t been using for 3 years, and when I used it again, it had PR3 in stead of PR1.

  9. Diverse linking is a good idea. I ignored this for a while as I was always commenting on the same set of blogs.

  10. I agree that diverse linking is key, but natural links are the single best way to increase your ranking and trust in the search engines. But if your site is already overly promotional or just looks spammy and is full of ads, fat chance on getting any natural backlinks. And if you think about it, natural backlinks are the only backlinks that take you no time to build. And time is money after all.

  11. Love the post and it’s a point well made because no matter how much we all hype social media there is no dount that most blogs get 70-80% of their traffic from Google. Having said that most of that traffic is useless unless you convert them in to long term readers.

  12. Man, I’ve got to say that’s a lot of work for unsure benefit. For me, I’d rather spend more of my time doing internal linking throughout my blog to highlight older posts and help build my authority that way than searching the internet for specific types of sites and domain extensions to comment on. I do understand that type of link sculpting but I also think it impedes other things that would give people more benefit such as creating new content and the like.

  13. I think, if search engine measures domain authority by the number of quality pages that link to a particular domain, and then inbound links from high PR sites like Wikipedia; plays an important role in site`s position in SERP. But, I am confused about the importance of getting inbound links from niche specific sites.

  14. Great info. I have studied seo for a couple years and this is some of the most important stuff I have read on the subject.

    Can’t wait to implement these strategies.

    Brandon

  15. You have got me thinking about ways I can change my own strategies. Thanks!

  16. I have come to conclusion that link building has become outdated. Of course, they still count, but search engines are getting smarter each day. It’s their reputation to provide best results not best optimized results.

  17. R Kumar, You gave some very valuable tips and I’m going to try out building deep links on my blog. I’m so glad I read this article today. I’m going to edit my articles right now. Thanks again!!

  18. Thanks for the informative post. The thoughts on getting an assortment of tld backlinks was good. And inner page linking is important, both from your own pages to other pages and from other sites. The other thing is that this all takes time…. But if you are building a business it is certainly worth it.

  19. building links can be tiresome and the rewards of gaining authority can take time. Thats why it is called a “reward” ! Nothing comes easy. You are rewarded for your time and effort to build good, solid, trustworthy links.

  20. Thank you for sharing this info. I never knew about this before. I just do my best to write good quality contents and doing internal linking in my blog.

    So, this is new for me! Can’t wait to do these strategies.

  21. Thank you for sharing this info. I never knew about this before. I just do my best to write good quality contents and doing internal linking in my blog.

    So, this is new for me! Can’t wait to do these strategies, too.

  22. How would you go about getting links from something like .edu or .ac.uk? I think it’d be pretty hard to persuade institutions like that to link to you.

  23. Great info in your post. I will be trying some of this out to see if it helps, but I spend most of my time creating content on a daily basis. Thanks for the tips.

  24. As an SEO consultant myself, I find that you have posted some great tips there like deep linking! Diverse linking is also very important in boosting your rank and making your links look natural.

    I find articles marketing, press releases, videos marketing are some of the best ways to awesome links back to your website and ranking your website. Most people don’t see any results because they thought you just need to do one or 2 links but the truth is you need hundreds and thousands of links per month for you to get any results.

  25. As someone who isn’t too rech savvy, how do I add links for my blog pages?

  26. Thanks Kumar for sharing you knowledge on links already am on to it!

  27. hmmm, that fake page rank tool, showed my site as invalid, but then when I clicked the “get PR button” it returned my button with my 5PR, doesn’t make much sense? Thanks for the great write up and tips.

  28. Great post for newbies like me…I feel really a warm respect to Daren who allows great writers to publish guest posts on this Ultimate Blog. I can say if W3cschools is the best for learning html and css then Problogger is Heaven for Bloggers.

    And last but not the least Great Thanks to R Kumar for this useful post.really creative ….

  29. This is great post again..domain authority is keen in developing a trusted reader base.The more authority you gain on your niche,the more does your coverage grow.

    Simple fact stated in a clear and precise fashion

    Thanks for sharing

  30. I always find that a good mixture of linking “methods” will give the diversity you need. Article writing, social bookmarking, commenting, guest blogging, hubpage and squidoo lenses – all work to give this diversity.

  31. Hadn’t given much thought to deep linking to specific pages of my websites/blogs, rather than the home page itself. Excellent suggestion and I will adjust my commenting and requests to reflect this. Thanks Kumar.

  32. You have some helpful ideas for me here and I love that. For one, I comment on a lot of blogs because I like the’ social’ in social media, but I almost always link to my blog home page. Spreading the links deeper into my blog is a great idea! A also like the idea of trying to comment on other types of sites like .orgs and .edus. Great idea too. Thanks.

  33. Thanks do much for this post. I’m a new blogger, and starting out with the little information I had about blogging was hard. It took me a while to even realize what SEO, Link building, & domain authority was, & the impact they had on my blog. I’ve been using problogger as sort of a handbook :) & it has helped a lot. Thanks again.

    Danielle

  34. Here is a similar story

    One of the most misunderstood SEO and link building factors is authority. What makes it so hard for a new site to score and what makes some sites get away with more unnatural behavior than others? Let’s explore domain authority and how to use it to your own benefit.

  35. Thank you for these valuable pointers re linkage and domain…I think it is easy to overlook the idea of deeper linkages in our quest to satisfy the immediate. ‘A comment for a comment’ has always seemed to me, other than for the reason of politeness and personal interest, a very slow way to grow a blog. xv

  36. Deep linking is probably one of the most crucial points you brought up. This is one area that many people should concentrate on as it one of the best ways to improve your domain authority.

    Thanks for the great article!

  37. That’s what it’s all about. It’s about quality links instead of just mass quantity!

  38. Very very informative. I have learned alot from your blog thank you. I will put your advice to work for me. Thank you

  39. All this linking stuff, totally foreign language to me. I’m in the process of starting up a photography business, and started a blog and website to compliment my business. Now that I’m taking time to browse the web I’m finding the entire process to be super confusing, but my desire to learn more….and just “figure it all out” is becoming sooooo time consuming. I fear my fiance may soon leave me believing that I have found something more interesting than him. Oh and lets not forget that fact that my my head is about to explode from all the info I keep jamming into it night after night…

  40. Basicly, it is all about quality of backlinks. In the beginning I was focusing only on number of links but it seems that is not as important as the quality of sites I am obtaining link from.

  41. Great post. I’ve just started to get a DA on my blog after around 12 months and building on it by writing articles on quality sites etc. I’ve also found that when I moved my blog from a blogspot address to a dynamic URL and started linking to that, things started to happen.

  42. Really useful post . Thanks for sharing Mr. R. Kumar and Mr. Daren.
    Guest Posting is a great facilities for new bloggers and Problogger did very respectable job to allow guest posting in such a Popular Brand Blog in Industry…
    Keep it up.

  43. I am still new and I think I needed to learn more about how does this seo works. and your post is a best start for me to understand the big thing soon. Thanks a lot dear, I really apprciate your post. :)

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