- I might add agency, Neil Patel, digital.
We constantly get clients telling us I need a lot
of high domain authority links.
People are asking for this left and right.
And everyone believes that you need that to rank at the top
of Google and those are the only
kinds of links you need.
Hi everyone.
I'm Neil Patel.
And today I'm going to break down
if you really need high domain authority links to rank.
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Now before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel.
And if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
Now, if you're probably wondering, the short answer is
is yes, high domain authority links do help with rankings
but do you really need all your links to
be high domain authority?
And I'm going to break down how you can get that answer.
It's not a simple yes or no, because it's going to vary
per term that you're trying to rank for.
Now, generally speaking, the better
the authority of links or sites linking to you, the better
off you're going to do because sites like Wikipedia.
Although those links are no fault Butler sites
like let's say New York times or Forbes
or entrepreneur or BBC or CNN tend to have more authority.
So the links carry more weight.
But those links are hard to get
and everyone's aiming for them.
And you may not need really
that many to rank and you may not need any at all
depending on the keyword that you're trying to rank for.
So let's first break down a keyword
that you may want to rank for.
Now, I'm going to Google a random keyword like dog food.
All right.
So let's say you want to rank for dog food.
Well, I want you to do is Google
for the term that you want to rank for and pull up,
the first five or 10 pages that are ranking really high up.
Now, keep in mind a lot
of the sites that rank may have high domain authority
and that can skew the results.
But in generally speaking, I want you to pull
up all the results that are ranking organically on page one
take them to Uber suggests and put
in the URL and you just go to Neil patel.com/uber suggest.
Now what you'll want to do is in the left navigation
click on SEO Explorer, then back links.
This is the backlinks report.
Let me put in the URL here.
That's ranking number one, make sure it's selected all
or exact URL and then click search.
And that's it.
As you can see domain authority, 58
735 links referring domains.
This page right here has 124 links from a domain authority
of one to 20, 72 links from 21 to 40,
19 links from 41 to 60,
14 links from 61 to 80 and only
five domains that are Lincolnton with 81 to a hundred.
So as you can see here, majority of the links
and this is for the first results of the ranking
at the top majority of links, based on this pie graph
it doesn't even look like, you know, less than 15%.
What's the total links?
So 234.
So this is 14.
This is five less than 10% of the links actually
have a high domain authority linking to this URL.
So now let's go to the next result.
Petco, let's block that.
And I'm going to go back to Uber suggest again
you want to look at URL, click the search button
type it in 2,587 backlinks,
similar only eight domains from 81 to 100,
9 from 61 to 80.
So very little so you're talking about eight plus nine 17.
So when I do the rough math 17 divided
by let's move this two, five, eight, seven
and you're looking at less than 1%
of their links have a high domain authority
for this Petco URL.
Now let me go to Amazon now, again, I know Petco, Amazon
some of them have high domain authority.
And as you can see with the Amazon URL
they have a high domain authority, 166 backlinks
73 referring domains.
Let's see, only one link has an 81
to a hundred domain authority.
The rest are 21 to 40 and a one through 20.
But again, Amazon has a high overall authority.
Here's Purina.
Let's look that up in Uber suggest domain authority, 68
160 174 referring domains.
As you can see one domain, 81 to 102 domain, 61 to 80.
So that's three links out of 174.
That's pretty much, you know, around one to 2%.
So that's a really low number, right?
So when you think about it
when you're looking at somewhere like Purina
they don't have a lot of rich domain authority backlinks.
So in general, if you're worrying or thinking
like I need a lot of rich domain authority links to rank,
the biggest trend that you saw
with most of these pages that are ranking on page one,
majority of their links have low domain authority.
Don't obsess about domain authority, even though a lot
of tools like Moz and us and ATRA and SEM rush.
We have our own metrics of domain authority.
Google doesn't use domain authority.
It's just an indicator to show you that, Hey
this site has more authority links from it are better
but it doesn't mean that you need tons
of high domain authority links to rank.
And there's a lot of cases
especially when you get into longer tail terms and dog food
I would say is a head term and is competitive.
But there's a lot of terms out there that are less
competitive than terms like dog food.
So don't obsess about the domain authority,
focus on the sites linking
to you and their relevancy over anything else.
And when you're working on your link building,
just go out there
and get as many good natural links as possible.
Create a good product, create good content
and that's how you're going to win.
Instead of obsessing on your domain authority.
If you have any questions about domain authority
or anything related to SEO, leave a comment below.
If you enjoy the video, like it, share it.
If you need help with your link building
or just your rankings on Google, check out my ad agency
Neil Patel digital, thank you for your time.