Summary: You can’t know for certain that you have an authoritative domain but a number of factors, if present together, strongly indicate that this is the case.
There’s no hard and fast way of knowing that you have an authoritative domain – you can’t go and check a list and Google doesn’t flag particular domains as authoritative.
However, there are a number of signs that would certainly indicate that your domain is regarded as an authoritative domain. For example:
- Speed of indexing – if Google indexes your pages within hours of them going live, this is a strong indication.
- Your site has number one rankings for many searches where the search words include 4 or more words, in order, from the title tags of any page on your site.
- Sitelinks (see below) – these are links that appear below some sites in search results. These are meant to send users straight to popular areas of your site. They are automatically generated by Google based on your link structure The links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure (another very good reason for avoiding linking all pages to all other pages). You can block sitelinks that you don’t think are useful in Google Webmaster Tools. The appearance of sitelinks when you search for your brand or domain strongly suggests your site may be authoritative.
- Page rank – if your homepage page rank is 6 or higher, this is another strong indication of an authoritative domain.
- You have obtained links from 1,000 or more unique domains (check this in Yahoo Site Explorer, Google’s Webmaster Tools or LinkScape).
- DmR (Domain mozRank), as determined by LinkScape, is 6+. The DmR looks at the quality and quantity of sites that are linking to you.
- DmT (Domain mozTrust), as determined by LinkScape, is 5+. The DmT measures the level of trust of the domains that link to you.
- You have the option in Google’s Webmaster Tools of doing advanced image tagging and/or faster crawling.
Taken on their own, none of these factors are a hard and fast indication that you’re an authority domain. But a number of these factors being present are really strong indicators of an authoritative domain. Have a look at some competitors’ domains and see how they rank on this list!
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