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DA/DR/TF/WTF!
Firstly, what is Domain Authority or Domain Rating or Trust Flow? But if you’re on this article you probably already know what it is, right? Why else would you want to know how to increase something if you didn’t know what it was you were increasing! Bigger isn’t always better you know.
For the initiated increasing DA/DR is something you think you should do, want to do or worse – have been told to do. While DA/DR isn’t a sham metric (not by itself anyway) it can be very useful if you ignore biased/stacked cause and causation studies.
Just as you shouldn’t assume that all famous people are rich, the same applies in that not every high DA/DR is a quality site and receives millions of affluent, generous, ideal target audience traffic! One quick check of Fiverr (amongst others) sellers offer DA/DR 50+ sites for as little as $50; but checking the traffic on your favourite SAAS software usually yields there is no on-line footfall, so it’s as useful as DA/DR of 0 in that respect.
What score should you aim for?
It’s all a matter of time, but initially aim for your local, smaller competitors, with an eye on bigger competitors in 2-3 years time; if it’s Amazon or Google forget it – the 90+ club is reserved for the true goliaths of the digital world.
At time of writing, my site is DR 55 – which has been achieved through purely HARO links (and 5 niche edits) since March 2020. That’s good for 9 months, but you should aim a bit lower as 90% of links to my site are from DA/DR 50+ sites.
It hit the 50’s in 2 months and plateaued from there. It looks like we went viral, but unfortunately not the case, just good old HARO graft.
It took a large – thankfully temporary – drop when Dreamcast messed up one of their links to us, but normal business was resumed days later. If that’s not proof of one juicy link doing wonders then I don’t know what is. FYI, Naysayers, the dates match up exactly, no major updates in site either. An SEO voyeur even emailed me asking me about it!
DA/DR’s are logarithmic: yeah I don’t know what it means either. Think of it as a ladder – the higher you get to climb, the harder it gets to keep going (scary AF) / get higher DA/DR.
Climbing a ladder from 0 – 1 metre is quite the breeze, while things get pretty windy and tough at 9-10 metres. Hence my site being stuckin the 50’s from month 3 to now!
This is how you do it…
Fiverr and other cheap ass gigs
Yes, buy those cheap gigs and get tens of high DA/DR’s pointing at your sites in 24 hours or less. Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs etc ratings use the amount/quality of links pointing at your site when determining their own rating.
They’ve come on leaps and bounds in weeding out spam, discounting artificially inflated sites, But there’re no doubt some still slip through the cracks. If you paid $500 for 10 high DA/DR links, and they only included 2 in their analysis, that is still 2 sites that will help include your links.
Ditch the spammy links
Yes, Google just ignores them now rather than penalising them but that’s not to say that Moz and Ahrefs do the same. Moz say so here,
The problem with this method is that you can do more damage than good with the disavow tool – and it’s important to remember only Google can see/use this, so Moz/Ahrefs won’t know what links you tell them not to count.
To eradicate them completely from their calculations you’ll need to get them removed, no easy task with spam links, especially the ones that are scraped/automated.
Hey, I never said it was going to be easy. Plus if your score goes down, don’t be coming back at me. Like bodybuilding/sculpting – DA is for show, it doesn’t really represent your sites internal health. In fact a fellow SEO once compared SEO to fitness, well worth a read
Get high-quality links
Simple right, you probably didn’t need to read this much for me to tell you that, but scroll depth, time on page people! But the best way is to get topical, high authority links from websites with genuine traffic.
You can buy or earn these links, whether it’s editorial links from us, yourself or the plethora of other link building/buying options available.
I suggest this ultimate link building article from Jon Cooper, I read this when first getting into SEO, and it has everything you can ever think of, and more importantly – ones you won’t. Just putting 2-3 of these tactics in place will get your DA shooting up in no time.
Get lower (read easier) DR links
Yes, you read that right, the most important thing is to ensure it is topical, as getting links from sites that are relevant to yours will enhance the chances of the traffic following too i.e people clicking on the link – consequently what they were originally designed for!
There are some low hanging fruit and easier websites to get links from in HARO; go for them first.
More visits to your site will result in more traffic (obviously), this will be reflected in the SAAS calculations of your DR/DA/TF metrics. No matter if they are nofollow, follow or UGC/SPON links, referral traffic doesn’t care.
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