Domain Authority, what is it?

Domain authority (MOZ) is score which ranges from 0 to 100 (100 being the best score) that tells us about the ability of internet site to rank in search engines. The higher the Domain Authority (DA) score, the higher chance for a site to rank well on search engines and vice versa.

The importance of DA

“Google” does not exactly state that DA is connected to sites ability to rank well on search engines, but based on the research done by many professionals, the sites that rank well on search engines have high DA score as well.
DA has mostly replaced Page Rank (PR), since many professionals claim that the PR ranking system is outdated and irrelevant, nowadays.

Domain Authority Factors

Although there are over 100 factors to calculate the DA, most important are:

• Backlink count and their quality
• Refering domains count
• Domain age
• Social signals
• Site performance
• Quality of site’s content
• Moz trust

How to improve DA?

In short we need to check our Domain Authority Score. Then we need to optimize the internal links of our site. Once that is done, we need to enrich our site with high quality content. After that we need to start with gaining good quality backlinks.

It’s not a rare thing that you hear that a site is “suffering” from Google Penalty.

I had a lot of clients contacting me because they had their sites penalized by Google, and lost all of their rankings except for maybe few keywords that no one wants to rank for anyway…

In this post i will tell you more about Google Penalties and how to check if your site is affected.
Lets begin!

Google Penalty definition

One of the definitions could be: “The Google Penalty is an action taken by “Google” according to its search algorithms or manual actions against your website (or its rankings on google search pages rather)”. Usage of Black Hat SEO techniques is the usual suspect.

There are many other definitions, but our clients are more concerned about their site loosing rankings. Thankfully there are many actions you can take in order to remove the mentioned penalty!

Difference between Google penalties and filters.

In short, google filter is a part of the google’s main algorithm (such as Panda), which can by used to suppress your site on google search results, if the site has low quality in the eyes of Panda (and it is an automated action).
Google penalty is a manual action, rather than automated (which is the case with filters), on the google’s side.

How do i check if my site is affected?

To check if your site has a Google Penalties, please login to Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and navigate to: SEARCH TRAFFIC / MANUAL ACTIONS if you are using the Old Search Console (as shown at the image below).

If you are using the new Search Console, navigate to: SECURITY & MANUAL ACTIONS / MANUAL ACTIONS (take a look at the image below).

Hope this helps you understand Google Penalties (and filters) better!
In the next post, i will show share with you the list of the most common types of Google (filtering) Penalties, and the difference between them. You will also learn how to get rid of them!

Further reading: Learn more about SEO.

As in previous years, this year I am also presenting to you the SEO trends I regard as dominant in 2017:

AMP

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) enables creation of web sites that can be downloaded to mobile devices almost instantly. Having in mind that Google itself started using this option, more and more brands are starting to adhere to it. In general, AMP includes three sections:  AMP HTML, AMP JS and Google AMP Cache. The basis of this protocol is the idea that several simple changes in the website structure can enable its download four times faster while using considerably less data at the same time. It has been noticed for some time that the websites which had adopted the AMP protocol have better rankings in Google searches (in addition, they are marked with a small thunderbolt icon, which improves their visibility). In my opinion, this trend will only be strengthened in 2017 and a growing number of websites will switch to using this option. A set of rules constituting the AMP protocol is becoming a new standard for creating contents for mobile devices.

Quality content

Quality content has always been an important factor in determining the position of a webpage in Google results, but is gaining even more importance along with the improvement of search algorhytms. This is a natural consequence of an aspiration to favor contents written in natural language over contents that are often burdened with excessive use of keywords in an attempt to gain better position and thereby potentially increase traffic to a website. Recent researches conducted by SearchMetrics have shown that in the top ranked results there has been a significant decrease in presence of keywords in title- and h1 tags, which clearly indicates that something that used to be a norm slowly falls into the background and gives way to different trends that are more orientated to quality and naturalness of content. It is expected that in 2017 the ranking of websites that set their priorities this way during optimization will be further improved.

SEO for mobile devices comes first

The improvement of performance of mobile devices and the emergence of the possibility to view web contents this way has led to the need to conduct optimization in this domain as well. Until 2015 and the introduction of AMP, however, optimization for mobile devices was considered only a part of a wider optimization process for desktop computer and was not given particular attention. In the next two years, an increased presence of AMP websites as well as the announcement that the web page indexing will be conducted taking into account the degree of optimization for mobile devices has brought about a new situation in which desktop computers are no longer the main initiators for the application of SEO methods: their place has been taken by mobile devices.

Mobile-first strategies

An increased number of mobile users imposes the need to adjust the look of websites for smaller screen resolutions while keeping the clarity and attractiveness of content as well as the functionality of the page itself. Software manufacturers keep making new tools that are supposed to facilitate the achievement of this goal.

More rich answers and snippets

Nowadays, internet has become the main source of information, and Google is the main tool that is helping us to get them. The responses to our queries often have a form that implies a lot of related contents and certain structure. Such “rich” or “direct” answers are becoming more and more prevalent, hence websites that are optimized for them get better positions in search results. Rich answers are obtained by extraction of metadata from content which are later used in many structured displays, tables, diagrams and the like. A recent stydy has shown that the number of rich answers in Google results has doubled in the last three years.

Other factors worth mentioning are voice search, optimization for user intent…