User Experience vs. Popularity in Determining Domain Authority
Link: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/domain-authority/246515/246515/#close
Will Roth–wwr27
User Experience vs. Popularity in Determining Domain Authority
Technology companies have worked for generations to produce a metric for signaling domain authority. Now that we’ve reached a point technologically where this may be possible, a new question has arisen: Does having a high site authority really matter for a website–and what criteria should even be used to determine authority? Writer Roger Montti attacks this question in his article, “John Mueller Rebuts Idea That Google Uses Domain Authority Signal.” He creates a definition of site authority as “a catch-all for all the quality signals that Google uses in it’s core algorithm.” Thereafter, Montti uses this definition to analyze evidence as to whether Google uses any sort of metric for detecting domain authority. After emphasizing that there is no hard evidence in words, patents, or research for Google using domain authority, Montti concludes that Google does not utilize site authority for prioritizing which web pages a user is sent to. He also argues that search queries such as Google do not need to focus on determining site authority through simply analyzing the number of hubs and power of those hubs. User experience as well as spam should also be considered, he argues/
In class, we explored hubs and authorities and learned that the number of in-links from a hub to an authority is essential to the authority’s ranking–More in-links correspond to higher rankings. With a higher ranking, an authority will be more likely to show up for a user when a search query involving that website is done. Furthermore, we learned that it was beneficial to determine the ranking of an authority in that higher-ranked authorities should be thought of as more trustworthy web pages since they are more frequently endorsed. Montti indirectly undermines this idea, as he maintains that, “User satisfaction is the ultimate decider of what site gets to rank number one, not which site has the most links or which site is the most spam free or any combination of those kinds of metrics.” Although he admits, “Inbound links help build credibility that a page is useful.” Montti’s argument is that individual experience on a site is a more accurate indicator of viewer satisfaction than how many clicks the site has received. This is intuitive in that focusing too much on how popular a site is may hide very useful web pages which are simply smaller in scale and recognition. Prioritizing user experience in site rankings allows for a “leveling of the playing field” in a way, in that sites with less initial clout will still be able to gain exposure if there website is helpful to society. With that said, how many times a page has been visited does give an indication of how reliable the web page is–Web pages endorsed by the most people should intuitively be more reliable and in turn have higher authority scores. There should be a balance between evaluating user experience and popularity when making decisions as to how to rank web pages.