The Differences and Similarities between Domain Name Value and Authority

When it comes to selecting a new domain, the use of various strategies based on specific key words you get from your keyword research techniques or of unique words and phrases that sound cool or interesting when placed into perspective with your business niche are often great ways to find the name of your new website.

The question, however, is whether the domain you choose has enough value and authority to help you draw traffic, get quickly improving results when it comes to web ranking or increase your sales. In order to get a valid answer, of course, you will need to know exactly what domain authority and worth/value refer to.

About Domain Authority

Domain authority is basically a prediction or estimate made by experts which is geared to determine just how well a domain would rank in search engines or according to various ranking algorithms.

Generally, there are many criteria that can be used to determine this valuable piece of information about any domain name; however, according to most experts, the authority of a domain name is based on the accurate measurement of three important factors. These are the age of the domain, its size and its overall popularity.

Each of these can be measured, and with the right knowledge, an experienced webmaster can use them to determine both the authority, as well as the worth, of a domain in order to find out whether it has enough potential to serve as a useful marketing tool.

Measuring the Factors

While the age of domain names can be easily determined, when you search for methods and tools designed to measure domain popularity, there will be almost as many different variations of this metric as there are sites that offer solutions for it.

The popularity of a domain name, however, can be determined by examining the following three criteria:

• Brand search volume – which points to the number of searches targeting branded keywords contained in the domain’s name;

• Social media mentions – involving the domain’s popularity on some of the most important and well-known social websites;

• The number, diversity and quality of the links pointing back to the domain’s URL – a factor that’s also highly significant when it comes to page ranking.

The size of a domain is also important, and statistics show that the most popular 250 domains in the world today have an average length of about 7 characters. This puts into perspective the influence that a lengthy name can have on domain popularity and authority as a whole.

 

As an example of a powerful service geared towards determining domain authority, SEOMoz has one of the most comprehensive algorithms for calculating it. Their 100 point logarithmic scale is produced by adding factors such as linking root domains or the combination of their special MOZrank and MOZtrust metrics into a single, accurate score.

Domain Worth vs. Authority

There is a significant difference between a domain’s authority and its value. While there are some cool domain names, for instance, that might be worth quite a lot, and if you buy them, they could be turned into traffic generation “machines”, they might still be quite new, and even if they’re not, many of them won’t have the authority you need for your site to become fully successful from the start.

This is mainly because there are several other details that would determine a domain name’s value, aside from the ones that establish its overall authority.

When it comes, for example, to expired domain ranking, Alexa, PageRank, known DNS status, the number of inbound links and a host of other page ranking factors could potentially raise the value of a domain, making it more difficult to purchase at a lower price unless maybe you place a backorder with a major backorder service in order to acquire it.

Of course, buying expired domains can be a great asset for your business endeavors, however, again, there are a variety of other variables as well that could influence the value of the domain itself.

You have to check if the domain name was spelled correctly and whether it was hyphenated or it resorts to the use of numbers, prefixes, suffixes or abbreviations in the place of actual words. If any of this is true, chances are that the domain you are pursuing isn’t worth very much. Also, longer domain names usually tend to be less valuable since they are difficult to write down or remember.

Even though domain name authority and value often go hand in hand, there doesn’t necessarily have to be a clear connection between them in every case, and because of the diversity between domains in terms of purpose and their varied worth when it comes to competing or differing business niches, buying a domain worth more than $5000 might not be worth much to you – or it could be worth much more than you paid for it.