Domain Authority is an incredibly well-known metric throughout the SEO industry, but what exactly is the right way to use it? In this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday, we're delighted to welcome Cyrus Shepard as he explains both what's new with the new Domain Authority 2.0 update, and how to best harness its power for your own SEO success.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, SEO fans. Welcome to a very special edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard. I'm honored to be here today with Moz to talk about the new Domain Authority[1]. I want to talk about how to use Domain Authority to do actual SEO.
What is Domain Authority?
Let's start with a definition of what Domain Authority actually is because there's a lot of confusion out there. A Domain Authority is a metric, from 1 to 100, which predicts how well a domain will rank in Google. Now let's break that down a little bit and talk about some of the myths of Domain Authority.
Is Domain Authority a ranking factor? No, Domain Authority is not a ranking factor. Does Google use Domain Authority in its algorithm? No, Google does not use Domain Authority in its algorithm. Now Google may use some domain-like metrics based on links similar to Domain Authority, but they do not use Domain Authority itself. In fact, it's best if you don't bring it up with them. They don't tend to like that very much.
So if it's not a ranking factor, if Google doesn't use it, what does Domain Authority actually do? It does one thing very, very well.