How to Check Domain Authority for Free Using Moz

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Video Transcript: How to Check Domain Authority for Free Using Moz

Hi, guys. In this module, I’m going to show you how to use Moz which is an SEO tool to see the authority of websites you want to reach out to, to build links with and in addition to that I’m going to show you how to install the MozBar which will allow you with Chrome in the Chrome extensions you can add this to your Google Chrome browser in order to see what domain authorities websites have before you approach them to outreach for links and to make sure that the right kind of website in terms of authority that you want to be linking to.

First of all, let’s head over to moz.com. Now, when you hit moz.com, you’ll see this big yellow button here and if you do click this button I’m going to show you, it will ask you to sign up for the pro trial in terms of creating a Moz Pro account and it will ask you for billing information as well. Now, this might put a lot of people off. There’s a little shortcut I’m going to show you to create a free Moz account that you don’t need to put your billing information into. I’m going to go back to their home page, I’m going to click on the login and instead of logging in, I’m going to click on create an account. I’m going to put my email, display name and password in and create a new account. I’ve done all the information.

I’m going to click the create account button and then you have to verify your email. I’m going to go ahead and head over to my email accounts and verify that now as well. Then once you verify your account, you will see this screen which is the Moz home screen and congratulations you’ve created a Moz account without doing their pro tutorial and entering your card details. Now, you have access to the free version of Moz which is all we need for this version of the tutorial. The next thing you want to do is install the MozBar chrome extension.

I’m going to go ahead and show you guys how to do that now. Next thing I mentioned was installing the MozBar. In order to do that, simply head over to your browser and this is an easy way to do it instead of browsing around the Moz website and type in Mozbar all in one word. Now, when you go to the Google search results page we’ll see it there and it’s underneath the advert which is the premium tour. Of course, Moz are going to try and sell you their products which is nothing wrong with that but head over to the free listing down below and then you’ll see a big yellow button that says download MozBar for free. Click on that button, it’ll bring up your chrome Web Store.

Remember this has to be in Google Chrome and then all you need to do is click on add to Chrome, this big blue button here and then add extension. It’s getting there and there we go. The MozBar has now been added to Chrome. You’ll see in the top right corner with all your other extensions in the extension area of Chrome you will see Moz is here as well. You can click it to turn it on, the icon will turn blue, turn it off it will go gray again. That’s how you install the MozBar. Now, the reason we’ve installed that is so we can see specifically what the domain authority of different websites actually is.

Let’s do an example. Let’s head over to one of the most popular websites here in the UK. Let’s go to bbc.co.uk. Now, we’re on bbc.co.uk on the home page of the BBC, a very highly authoritative website you die to get a link like this in reality. I’m going to head over to the icon tray here where the MozBar appears and I’m going to click it once and the MozBar will pop up with a load of information. You can see here at the top the MozBar has been deployed, you’ll see the Moz icon here and you’ll see a lot of details across the top and these details are very important for your link building because this will tell you how authoritative the website you’re looking at is.

For example, this particular page has a page authority score of 84 out of a hundred making it extremely authoritative as a page. More important than that, the domain authority, the domain of bbc.co.uk has an authority of 96 out of a hundred. It’s basically one of the most authoritative websites on the whole internet. It will also give you a lot of detail in terms of the backlink profile of the page and by extension of the domain as well. You’ll see there are literally millions of links from thousands of root domains for the BBC’s homepage. In addition to that, you’ll see there are multi-million links from multi-million domains to the domain itself.

Across the whole of the BBC’s domains they’re getting over 1.3 million links pointing to their domain making it a very authoritative which makes sense because of course, the BBC is a powerful resource, a lot of people will naturally link to it, they cover all things from news to sports, in fact, everything. That is why it’s got such a high score. Getting a link from a website like this will be really good. In addition to that Moz has what’s called a relative spam score. As you see here, the BBC spam score is 1% out of a hundred. Now, a spam score is essentially looking at the backlink profile of the website and seeing how many links as a percentage are spammy based on the backlink profiles of those websites.

If you’ve got a lot of spammy websites maybe pornography and gambling a lot of websites that have been hacked or cloaked pointing towards the website and a large percentage of links are from websites like that then you’re going to be in a position where your website is very spammy and Moz can detect those kinds of links. It’s really important to check the spam score as well. By all accounts, the BBC is a very good website to get links from as you can see, of course, it’s not very easy to get a link from the BBC. Let’s check another random website. Let’s check something else. Let’s check a local business. I’m going to type in plumber in London.

That’s going to bring up a ton of local businesses. Now, let’s not click the adverts and waste anyone’s money. Let’s go further down and what you’ll notice is every single search result because the MozBar is enabled will have the same data I mentioned to you within the search results directly. You can see a very quick glance who the biggest most authoritative plumbers are in terms of their websites on Google. You can see Pimlico plumbers has a domain authority of 53 out of a hundred which is really good. You go further down the page in position three you’ll see that myplumber.co.uk has a domain authority of 28.

Again, not too bad at all but this will give you a good indication of who are the biggest, most powerful in terms of authority websites there are in your niche. When you start searching for your competitors or for even potentially people you want to get links from do it in this method and you will see from here say for example I want to get links to my website and I’m in the plumbing niche I need to start looking for people who are talking about plumbing and talking to plumbers who of course aren’t my competitors but would be happy for me to potentially write an article or reach out to get a link and this method will give you an indication if it’s worthwhile or not.

As an example what I’m going to do, I’m going to jump ahead to the page no one goes to, page 10 of the search results just to see if there’s any websites in here with very low authority and there’s one right here. Plumbingandheatingnetwork.co.uk. In fact, this one is loaded so that one isn’t a good example but let’s go further down and see if there’s any with a very low authority. For example, hackney-plumbers.co.uk, domain authority is 22 doesn’t mean it’s a good link to get, doesn’t mean it’s not necessarily a good link to get but it does mean that it’s a lot lower authority than some of the other big players we saw further up.

This gives you an indication as to the authority of the different websites you want to get links from. Now, again, I’m going to mention this as I have done previously domain authority is a metric from Moz. Google determine who goes to the top of the search rankings and determine the value of links. Google, of course, won’t disclose their algorithm on how they judge links. Moz is the next best thing we have and as an index don’t take it as gospel just make sure you’re using it as a general direction pushing or interest pushing of where you want to get links from.

Don’t think oh this website has a domain authority of 50, therefore, it has to be good because it might have a ton of spammy links, it might not be in any way related to your niche. They might have a lot of spammy content, they might have acquired those links in very unscrupulous ways. You’ve got to make sure you do a bit of research as well on links and that’s another module in this course as well. This is just the beginning, it’s how to understand how to see which websites have high or low authority and it’s a good way to get started with prospects for link building.