Do You Really Need High Domain Authority Links?

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. Today I'm going to break down if you really need high domain authority links to rank.Now, if you're probably wondering, the short answer 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.

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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.

So let's first break down a keyword that you may want to rank for. 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.

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.

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