When it comes to the Internet, we all know there are good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. (Pixelated waving flag? Bad neighborhood.) But if you need some help making sure your website is on the right side of the virtual tracks, then Domain Authority can help.

Search engines like Google use algorithms to do with websites what every parent wishes they could do with their kids’ friends: determine trustworthiness and rank them accordingly. To predict this search engine favoritism, inbound marketing SaaS company Moz developed a metric called Domain Authority that ranks sites around a 100-point scale.

What Is Domain Authority?

Using machine learning and a slew of factors, data signals, and link metrics, Domain Authority reflects the likely ranking of a website in Google’s search results. The score is logarithmic, which — in case it has been a while since your calculus days — just means that it gets harder to improve your score the closer you get to 100. That said, a few sites have managed to produce near-perfect Domain Authority numbers. Take a look at Moz’s list of the top domains as of January 10, 2014, which includes Facebook as the Domain Authority valedictorian.

The Top 10 Moz Domains

Building Virtual Trust

Comparable to the way trust is garnered in the real world, trustworthiness online stems largely from reputation over time and the sites you surround yourself with. Domain Authority uses a variety of signals to measure the quality, volume, and relevance of your website’s inbound and outbound links as a measure of virtual trust.

Source: The Internet Map [http://internet-map.net/]

The use of myriad metrics in calculating Domain Authority was intentional — it’s a predictive tool for Google’s complex ranking algorithm, after all, so the calculation reflects that complexity. This also means it’s a difficult metric to influence directly through a single change in your SEO practices. Since it uses so many dynamic factors to calculate its score, Domain Authority is more useful as a comparative metric against other sites than as a history benchmark for your own SEO performance.

The basic thinking behind Domain Authority’s emphasis on linking is this: if you link to spam, then odds are you’re a spammer; if trustworthy sites link to you, then odds are you’re trustworthy. Take another look at Facebook’s Moz metrics above — with nearly 1.5 more linking domains than its nearest competition, Facebook has clearly established a vast network of sites that connect directly to its domain. And in the Domain Authority analysis, linking metrics aren’t treated as static, but are evaluated over time. That means it’s easy to see if a site gets a big spike in links due to link buying versus a burst of organic links to blogs and forums more consistent with earned media. So to boost your Domain Authority, consistency is key — especially through your domain’s use of on-brand content marketing tactics like blogging, SEO link-building campaigns, and social media marketing.

Curious about your Domain Authority score? You can measure Domain Authority using Open Site Explorer or the MozBar, Moz’s free SEO toolbar. TrackMaven includes Moz’s SEO metrics ;)