High domain authority websites are the websites that have established a good amount of trust and niche authority in search engines. Authority is usually gained by the domain age, quality, and content size.
Authority websites are the most preferred kind of websites when a search engine wants to rank the websites. This is also openly said by Google in their SEO documents.
On every Google core update, like Google's most recent November 2021 core update, it clearly mentioned in the tweet to check the SEO documents. And the documents tell you to concentrate on the E-A-T score.
EAT score stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. It was first mentioned by Google and since then it's the most used acronym by SEOs.
What is an Authority Website?
An authority website is a website that has gained major trust from Google and is considered the first to be evaluated when ranking for keywords. An authority website is the first preferred choice by Google to rank for important keywords.
An authority website gains its authority based on various factors. But the most important factors are the domain age, content quality and brand popularity.
This kind of authority website is preferred over other websites that are new for SEO rankings for various keywords. These websites have thousands of visitors every day and their articles are shared all over the internet on various platforms like social media networks.
When a website gains trust and authority in the eyes of Google spiders, it starts gaining high rankings for various search terms.
Authority Website Examples
An authority website can be found in almost all niches on Google. It can be easily identified by the number of articles, writers and quality content on various topics.
It is a good practice to showcase user activity on a website in its post comments, or social media shares. This helps improve the SEO of the website too.
Authority websites tend to flaunt their blog posts popularity. This will also help you recognize the authority of a website.
Another way to recognize an authority website is by checking its domain metrics in any of the free SEO tools like Semrush. When you input a domain name and check its domain overview in the Semrush dashboard, it shows all the basic and important information about the authority website domain.
As you can see in the above image, we used the Semrush tool to calculate the authority score of Semrush itself. Similarly, you can search for other websites in your niche and find their authority score to see their authoritativeness.
An authority score in the range of 65 – 100 is considered good by the search engine spiders. It helps understand the EAT value of a website.
Some other examples of authority websites are:
- Amazon.com
- Youtube.com
- Google.com
- Reddit.com
- Tumblr.com
And the list goes on.
These websites have authority in every niche as they are very big in size and have huge content in them.
But Google also classifies authority websites in specific niches. For example, the list of authority websites for SEO is:
- moz.com
- ahrefs.com
- searchenginejournal.com
- semrush.com
- searchenginewatch.com
- backlinko.com
When you search for any generic search keyword on Google, you will most probably see one or more than one of the websites in the top 10 search results. This shows that Google trusts these websites and has given them authority over other websites like ours, UnderWP.
Authority Backlinks
Link building is an important part of any SEO strategy that aims to get on top of search results. Building backlinks are the most important ranking factor for any website.
Building good backlinks for your website gets you the T (Trustworthiness) of EAT points in the eyes of Google bots. Google uses these backlinks to give a page rank to a website and its pages.
There is one wonderful article written by Danny Sullivan on the blog of Search Engine Land here: https://searchengineland.com/google-authority-metric-274231
The above post was written after an interview with one of the most prominent Google engineers called Paul Haahr. He is one of the smartest Google engineers I have been following over the years. You get to learn some highly valuable information when Paul talks.
In the above post, when you read the second paragraph, it clearly says that Google doesn't just reward the website pages that have lots of links but also the quality of links. This is a very important point to be learned here.
Building just links to your websites is not enough, but a high quality link building service is very important too. Check out our affordable and monthly backlink building service here:
Further, in the same article, you see the above two paragraphs. It is clearly answered by Google that there is no single signal that is considered to be an authoritative signal for a website. It is a mix of various signals that decide the authority factor of a website and its pages.
We dug furthermore to find the importance of authority links to a website. And we found this tweet.
Here it is clearly answered by one of the members of the Google search quality team that the authority of a website is largely affected by links and mentions on other authoritative websites. A very important point to be noted.
This tweet from 2018 solves a big mystery of authority backlinks. It says clearly that getting backlinks from an authority website of your niche is very valuable and helps you increase your website authority as well.
Final Words
Building an authority website is a time consuming and expensive option. Big companies hire a team to build an authority website.
This is the reason websites with good authority charge a huge amount for giving your website a link. When we do guest posting service for our clients, we see prices ranging from $600 to $10,000 for a single backlink from an authority website.
But there is also an easy way to get authority website links. That is by building quality content on your website. Or getting creative and building links in a creative way as we mentioned in one of our blog posts here: Get Free High Quality Backlinks The Creative Way
Links are an important ranking factor. It provides a strong signal of authority to Google and other search engines. They are not easy to build and require a huge amount of effort to be put in.
Or you can hire a trusted team like ours at UnderWP and let us do the tedious job or guest blog posting for getting good quality backlinks for your website. Get in touch with us if you want to build authority backlinks to your website and get on top of search engine results.
This is good info to keep in mind. Domain authority is a relative metric for the value of domaiin.