- 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. (upbeat music) 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.
