Backlinks are links on a website that link directly to another website. These links are also known as external links or inbound links.  Google and other search engines value and view these backlinks as support of this linked website. This ensures quality content due to the websites vouching for one another by linking together. Pages with more backlinks can rank higher on the search results page.  Backlinks have a massive impact on your SEO and are one of the most important categories search engines look at when ranking your website and content.

Quality of these links is a huge factor in how search engines rank them. If you have multiple backlinks from reputable websites with quality content that these links will help you tremendously in your ranking. The opposite is true as well, if you have hundreds of backlinks but they are from what google considers spammy, then they will not help much if any. There is a direct correlation between high ranking websites and websites with a lot of high quality backlinks. Google sees these backlinks as a recommendation from one website to visit the other.

There are different types of backlinks, nofollow, follow and paid or sponsored backlinks. Nofollow links are used when one needs to link to a website but doesn’t necessarily want to share its reputation with them. Nofollow links tell Google to not pass trust or reputation (page rank) to the linked website. These kind of backlinks won’t necessarily help you rank higher on the search engine ranking page. Follow backlinks however, do pass trust and reputation (page rank) to the linked website. If the linking website has a good or excellent reputation on Google, this could massively help your ranking on the search engine results page. The third and final type of backlink is paid or sponsored link. These links are when you may pay an affiliate or influencer to promote your website or content. These links will not negatively affect your website rankings.

Domain Authority is a way to assume or predict how well a website will rank on a search engine results page. Companies such as Moz and Ahrefs calculate a websites ranking by measuring its SEO power and it is ranked on a scale from 1 to 100. Domain Authority is calculated by taking in factors such as backlinks, number of pages and keywords. A higher score on Domain Authority means the website is more likely to rank higher in search engines. A lower score will make it difficult to rank in searches with competitive keywords. Domain Authority is an easy way to understand how Google ranks websites on their search pages. Google never states how exactly they rank each websites but Domain Authority is the most accurate representation in understanding how they rank websites.

While Domain Authority helps measure how your entire domain and subdomain will rank, Page Authority measure the strength and SEO of an individual page. Page Authority is a a score that gives an accurate representation on how well an individual page will rank on the search engine results page. Like Domain Authority, Page Authority is rated on a scale of 1 to 100. Page Authority is defined the same way as Domain Authority but on focusing on a specific page rather than the entire domain. Elements that help or hurt your Page Authority are things like keywords, content and links on the page. These are three extremely important aspects to pay attention to when learning SEO and how to improve website ranking.