What is Domain Trust and Domain Authority

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In the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), there are many terms and concepts that are important to understand in order to improve website rankings and increase organic traffic. Three of the most commonly discussed concepts are domain trust, domain authority, and domain rating. While they may sound similar, they each refer to different aspects of a website’s overall reputation and authority.

Domain Trust

Domain trust refers to the level of trust that search engines have in a particular domain. Search engines like Google want to provide their users with the most relevant and trustworthy results possible, and they use various factors to determine whether a website can be trusted. These factors may include the quality of the content on the website, the authority of the website’s backlinks, and the overall reputation of the domain.

Domain trust is difficult to measure and is not something that can be directly influenced by website owners. However, there are a few things that can indirectly improve domain trust. For example, creating high-quality content that is relevant and useful to users can help establish a website as a trustworthy source of information. Building high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites can also help signal to search engines that a website is reputable.

Domain Authority

Domain authority is a metric that was developed by Moz, a leading provider of SEO tools and resources. Moz’s domain authority (DA) score is a numerical rating that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). The score ranges from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating a greater likelihood of ranking well.

Moz calculates domain authority based on a number of factors, including the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to a website, the age of the domain, and the overall popularity of the domain. While domain authority is not a direct ranking factor used by search engines, it is a useful tool for SEO professionals to evaluate the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile.

It is important to note that domain authority is a relative metric, meaning that it is best used to compare one website to another within a similar niche or industry. A DA score of 50 for a blog about parenting would not be equivalent to a DA score of 50 for a major news website, for example. Nevertheless, a higher domain authority score generally indicates that a website is more authoritative and trustworthy in the eyes of both search engines and users.

Domain Rating

Domain rating is a metric that was developed by Ahrefs, another popular SEO tool provider. Like domain authority, domain rating (DR) is a numerical rating that predicts how well a website will rank on SERPs. The DR score ranges from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating a greater likelihood of ranking well.

Ahrefs calculates domain rating based primarily on the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to a website. However, the Ahrefs algorithm also takes into account factors like the age of the domain and the overall quality of the website’s content. As with domain authority, higher domain rating scores generally indicate that a website is more authoritative and trustworthy in the eyes of search engines and users.

One key difference between domain authority and domain rating is that Ahrefs updates DR scores more frequently than Moz updates DA scores. This means that DR scores may be more up-to-date and reflective of a website’s current backlink profile.

Conclusion

Domain trust, domain authority, and domain rating are all important concepts to understand in the context of SEO. While they each measure different aspects of a website’s authority and reputation, they all have one thing in common: a higher score or rating generally indicates that a website is more likely to rank well on search engine results pages. By building high-quality content and backlinks and taking steps to establish their website’s authority and reputation, website owners can improve their scores in all three areas and increase their chances of ranking well.

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How To: What are chained redirects and how do they hurt my SEO efforts?

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Let’s start at the beginning. What is a redirect? A redirect is when one URL receives a visitor but immediately sends the user to another website. It’s a search engine approved way of directing traffic, and although this can be very useful, it can also cause chaos for search engine crawlers, which in turn will wreak havoc on your rankings, both of the individual pages and your entire site.

The redirects mentioned above is what is known as a “permanent redirect” or a “301 redirect.” But because the permanent redirect isn’t frowned upon by search engines it can also be misused at times, chained redirects being a prime example.

These chained redirects can often become very long, and their adverse effects extend to more than just the inconvenience of users that have to sit through the entire redirect after the redirect process. This is the same for crawlers, so in essence, the longer your redirect chain, the more confusing it is for users and crawlers alike. We know that Google penalises slow load speeds, and this is one of the easiest ways to get yourself penalised precisely for that.

It’s a terrible user experience opening a link and being passed down an unknown pipeline only to end up, hopefully, where you initially set out to. Lots of research points to the fact that users will bounce from your site within 3 seconds if it’s not loaded, chained redirects make this virtually impossible.

The final factor to take into account is the fact that with every redirect some link juice will be lost, and this can result in diluted anchor text relevance while leading to crawling and indexing errors. As a rule of thumb, never exceed four consecutive redirects on any website domain. If you can avoid more than 2, it’ll be even better. Redirects are tools, and like most tools, they can be used negatively as well. Use them well, and they won’t do any harm, but try to get too clever, and your rankings could suffer.

What are Google Posts?

Google posts launch during the U.S. presidential campaigns as a way for candidates to promote content within the Google Search Results. They were later opened to businesses to promote their own content when users searched for their brand. The user was already searching for the brand so there is no danger of promoting one company over another in a generic search.
This story appears as a card within the knowledge graph results. This is the section with the business details as well as a few photographs and the map location. Not only are articles posted here but according to Google a business can use images, videos and animated Gifs to promote themselves here. This obviously has a huge advantage when it comes to your content marketing strategy.

 

Timely Results

In the past when you publish content you have to wait for Google to index it. Share it on social media and let it gain some value or traction. All this before it could gain some traffic and momentum from Search Engines. This could prove problematic because if you are running a promotion or a limited offer by the time the article has had time to gain satisfactory results the offer might be over. This means you have missed out on a bunch of customers.

Saving on Native or Other Paid Channels

We have not been able to test the results of Google Posts and cannot confirm if it will save you marketing budget but we believe that it is likely. When you want to promote an article you generally would need to buy some traffic. This traffic comes from sources like Native advertising, paid social media advertising or display advertising amongst other methods. These eat into your marketing budget. However, if you can gain even 20% of these visits from Google Posts that you would normally rely on gaining from elsewhere you are already 20% better off in terms of budget. These visits are also likely to result in a better conversion as the traffic is searching for your brand already. This means that for 20% less spend you can gain the same amount of traffic and convert more consumers. Leading to a much better ROI for your content marketing campaign. We would not only rely on Google Posts and would follow your normal strategy. Supplementing it with Google Posts and testing if it works.

Using Tracking Links

The problem with measuring the success of Google Posts is you cannot differentiate which traffic comes from Organic Search and which comes from Google Posts yet in Analytics. By using UTM codes in the URL you can see which traffic is from the knowledge graph and which is from regular Organic Traffic. This will determine the success of the campaign.

Google Posts are not available to everyone yet and you have to join a waiting list here. As with all things Google we must give new features time before we can understand the benefits. Google also can add and take away features at will. This feature does look like it has massive potential but we never know.