Google SEO and Domain Authority

To understand how to best optimize your site for Google you need to understand how the web's link graph works and how Google places value on a particular site. One of the most common SEO techniques is to build vast amounts of links back to a particular page in order to boost its popularity and rank it higher on Google's index.

Google's world-famous patent PageRank was designed originally to work out the popularity of a particular page on the web. It would consider where the link was coming from and how relevant it was to the target page. A link from a popular trusted page would be worth a lot more than a link from a page hardly visible on the web.

Google has evolved in the last few years and is now making rank calculations based on a domain level as well as on a page level. Google will now assess how many domains point to your domain, how much authority these domains have and how relevant they are to your content.

So, when we are building links back to our sites, we need to think about the type of domains pointing to us as well as the type of pages. For instance, a link from a deep page of an authority site may well be worth more than a link from the home page of a less recognized site.

So is it better to have an aged domain name or a brand new domain name and what is the real value of the aged domain name, to answer that question in full would require another article, but the simple answer is yes an aged domain can have a great deal of value, the older the domain the higher the authority of that domain, and that’s before any content.

Also, whilst thinking about the authority of our domain we need to think about where external links point to on our pages. A common mistake many newbie SEO's make is by building all their links to their home page leaving their deeper pages to drop out of the index, however Google will specifically look to see where links are pointing to. Google may consider all pages without links to be of no interest and therefore not worth adding to the index. Sites with good amounts of links popularity to deeper pages will always rank better on Google.

When practicing any SEO technique be sure to think about trust, authority and popularity from the perspective of your domain as a whole rather than a particular page. Do you ever wonder why authority sites seem to be able to rank new pages quickly? This is because they have huge amounts of domain authority; Google trusts them fully and therefore fully trusts every piece of content that comes from those domains. It's simple really build domain authority and rank higher on Google quicker.