There are a lot of hypothesis that say Google cares about domain authority which may include domain age, domain link profile, domain spam level, TLD, and so on. The idea for this test came from discussions over many different forums about domain authority, domain age, domain spam level. So, we decided to test whether the page receives any points from the domain under which it is located.
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The next test is from Boryslav. What he was doing here is he was looking at page authority which was something that we have worked on and we feel good about it, at least I feel good about it. Domain Authority really isn’t a thing. Domains doesn’t have an inherent authority. What we often perceive as Domain Authority is the linking between pages that have authority.
Authority is definitely at the page level. Boryslav wanted to look at this concept at a slightly different perspective where we are constantly creating test sets. If we create multiple test sets and domain authority is a thing, then these test sets which have different domains, they should start to rank in an orderly fashion, if these domains have a different values attached to them, then the test pages should start to rank in the same order as we continue to build them out.
We had a .win, a .com, .club, and .loan. You can see that the .com should be the clear winner here. It is above the others and it has referring domains and backlinks.
The concept is, if there is some sort of domain authority, the .com should be at the top of each set every time. The others, you could make the argument that perhaps there is nothing here that distinguishes them and they are below the threshold and we can see some variance there or you could also argue that there will be a domain authority attached to them regardless because there are some slight differences such as in the domains that they are receiving, the backlinks are different, etc.
If there is the concept of domain authority, what we would anticipate is that they would start to rank for duplicate pages across each of them in an orderly fashion.
The .com should be the winner but it isn’t consistently at the top and it isn’t near the top. The only consistency is the .win is at the bottom each time. Again, the .club is the one didn’t have any linking domains at all and at one test it was at the top.
This test is confirming for us what we are receiving before that the domain itself isn’t the factor or isn’t the thing carrying the authority. It definitely rests in the pages itself and those pages that are linking to other pages and sites that get them to pass authority but just the domain itself having a particular value or authority isn’t being passed to the fresh page that is being made and we can see that across these different domains.