Rand recently published a post discussing 17 ways a search engine values a link. His number 5 reason referred to Domain Authority and caused a little stir within the comments trail as to what Domain Authority actually meant and where the proof of its existence has been seen.

The aim of my first YOUmoz post is to provide an example of where I believe Domain Authority is highly evident as search engine ranking factor. Apologies but I can’t really include any analytics data due to data protection.

Setting the scene

So it’s October 2008 and progress is slow on making technical and content changes to our transactional sites to improve organic referrals. I have just come up with an idea that I believe will provide some quick wins both on the organic referrals and on our PPC conversion rates on broad commodity type keywords. When I say commodity I refer to keywords that describe a product category, such as capacitors or connectors.

The Tactic

Utilise our root domain to create high level product category landing pages such as:

www.farnell.com/uk/connectors

www.farnell.com/uk/capacitors

These are located within folders on our root domain, rather than in sub domains like our transactional websites. The idea is that they are closer to the root, better optimised and easier to get live quickly. Even back then I believed Domain Authority was a strong ranking factor for Google.

The Result

The results were pretty impressive almost immediately. Within about 30 minutes of promoting a page to production we would be ranking in Google, usually on pages 1-2. After around a day we would usually be on the first page on broad, competitive search terms.

Now consider that these commodity pages were brand new, reasonably well optimised on-page, but contained only 1 single back link from an internal source and we were capable of ranking on just about any search term within the space of 30 minutes. Yes we followed some on-site “best practices” but to my mind the single reason why these pages ranked so well, so quickly was Domain Authority.

Even now, after being live for a considerable period of time, again without any real SEO work, we proudly sit in top spot for connectors.

Try some other terms across other global search engines as examples:

Kondensatoren – Google Germany

Kondenzatory – Google Czech

Diodi – Google Italy

Kondensatorer – Google Denmark

Interested to hear more thoughts on Domain Authority from others. Do you feel this proves its importance or do you think other factors played into these