Very high-DA domains include pages like Wikipedia, with a DA of 97*, and TIME Magazine, with a DA of 94*. Other domains that tend to have very high DA ratings include popular newspapers and magazines, journals, and social media pages. Facebook, for example, has a DA of 96* (*DA scores fluctuate, so these are the Moz-checked DA rankings at the time of writing).
Search engines generally consider websites with a weaker domain authority less authoritative, so it’s more difficult to rank highly in the SERPs with a low-DA site.
If you establish a brand-new website, you’ll likely start with a DA score of 0, which doesn’t seem very authoritative or trustworthy, so Google is unlikely to rank you well. And, of course, why should the algorithm rank a page that’s just been established over well-established, highly authoritative pages?
This makes sense, of course, but it also presents new website owners with a problem. If they want their page to rank higher on Google, developing domain authority is paramount. In fact, it’s a critical piece of your SEO strategy.
To illustrate this with an example, let’s introduce Mark, a senior marketing manager at an engineering solutions company. Since he’s been in the game for a while, Mark knows how important DA is. But he also knows that you’ve got to start somewhere, so he goes ahead to buy a new domain – let’s call it Example Engineering Solutions. This baby domain has nothing on it yet, and a perfectly-useless DA of 0.
So how can Mark increase his DA score?
To work on that, you first have to understand how DA scores are calculated.