During my affiliate marketing and SEO journey I stumbled upon Domain Authority Stacking (DAS) on the Black Hat World Forum and on numerous websites such as Fiverr and Legiit. I instantly asked myself, well, 'what is Domain Authority Stacking DAS?'. So I began my google search and came across several sites that just offered me partial responses. Then I dug deeper and followed some posts from noted SEO experts. Eventually I gained an understanding and even some practical methods which I will now share with everyone here.
Domain Authority Stacking (DAS) is
an SEO method coined and developed by SEO expert Jimmy Kelly. The main point of
DAS is to link several levels of sites together in order to pass link authority
to your cash site. Immediately we can see the part of the method that resembles
tiered link pyramids, however there are numerous subtle distinctions worth
keeping in mind and the general impact on a website from this link building
procedure is quite different. It holds true that the efficiency of this method
is still debated among experts; nevertheless, I will simply present the
realities as I find them and let you be the judge.
Stacking Domain Authority generally is a
process of linking multiple Web 2.0 and social sites to higher tier sites. It
is stated that this is to provide your link profile a more natural and organic
structure which google algorithms prefer. Here is a streamlined example of DAS
in action:
As you can see, unlike a basic link
pyramid, the links don't follow a sensible order, not all tier 3 links point to
tier 2 links for example.
The typical link building approach
often uses automated tools like GSA to improve the lower level tiers, this
resembles the method utilized in the typical tiered link pyramid. The typical tiered link pyramid would resemble something more like this:
Automated GSA links to the lower
tiers can increase the number sites to get indexed and can increase the page
authority of the stacks. Bearing this in mind, understand that the initial
diagram is a real oversimplification of domain authority stacking (DAS). A complete Domain Authority
Stack will generally look more like this:
As suggested by the above image, the time and work needed to do this
is considerable. So we should most likely explore my next inquiry:
Does it actually work?
Like in the majority of subjects there
are two schools of thought when it comes
to the value of Domain Authority Stacking (DAS). Some see it as another hyped up
fad while others see it as the new miracle grow for your website. In this argument it
is well worth keeping in mind that the strongest proponents of DAS are those who
are selling and promoting them as a
service. Yet, after exploring a few of my own stacks that I created, I noticed that my MOZ metrics went up several points.
Clearly an improvement in
the metrics is desirable, but my goal is to rank on google and what ranks in MOZ doesn't necessarily rank on google. Yet in my own case study I did see an increase in impressions
for a few of my targeted keywords. So having stated this much I will let you be
the judge about whether DAS is worthwhile or not.
There are many factors to consider and bearing in mind
that testing is the way to truth, so you can outsource this for cheap on
legit if you want to test it out. Testing is usually the best
approach to this. However if you want to set it up yourself there is a much simpler and quicker way that will save you a load of time and that short cut is
IFTTT.
What is
IFTTT?
If you have not currently heard of
it, the letters represent: 'If This Then That'. This is a complimentary tool
that allows you to develop recipes that trigger an action based on another
action. For example, 'if you publish to Facebook, share the post to Twitter.' There are hundreds (if not more) such recipes (now called applets) that you can develop using this
tool, consisting of an automated link structure and DAS setup.
to learn more about IFTTT and see a
complete tutorial on how to utilize it click here.
How is IFTTT Related to DAS?
One of the most popular applets/reciptes lets you to automatically re-post content from your blog's RSS feed to Web
2.0 and social sites. To effectively use this
you have a couple of alternatives for identifying the syndicated content on
your Web 2.0 blog sites. The tag 'rel=canonical' is probably the best way to make certain
your syndicated material does not lead to duplicate content problems. If that is
not an option for you, you can set the copies of the original post to no-index or at
minimum, you ought to have just a link to the original short article, the last
choice being the least efficient of the three, this can be achieved with
plugins for WordPress and a few scripts for other CMS based websites.
By using the recipe/applet pointed out
above, you can get backlinks from 8-12 Web 2.0 websites and it will automatically
publish to the Web 2.0 websites every time you release a brand-new post. It
holds true that your web 2.0 sites are not likely to rank since those sites are
made up of duplicate content, nevertheless, they are able to pass authority
back to your money website through the links embedded in your posts, which makes it even more important to connect to pages on your website in the body of
the short articles that you post on the Web 2.0 sites.
Because freshly produced Web 2.0
sites are not going to have much trust or page authority (PA), you will need to
connect to them from other Web 2.0 s and social profiles to increase their page
authority and trust circulation. This is where DAS can come in handy. Rather than connecting the stacks straight to your cash website, you can create a stack
below each of the Web 2.0 websites that are linking to your money site. In
addition to producing these stacks, you can also develop links to the lower tiers
in order to increase the general authority of each stack. If you wish to avoid
low-quality links on all levels, simply create a couple of Web 2.0 sites worthy
of being connected to and do some outreach, guest posting, and expired link
building to charge them up.
Is this Strategy Worth the Time and Effort?
In the above description I have just
scratched the surface of what enters into domain authority stacking and content
syndication methods. If you plan on giving this method a try you need to dig
much deeper into the how and why prior to attempting this. As stated earlier my preferred method is to use a few test websites and try out different variations of these
techniques and see how it works for you.
When considering the time,
investment and potential return, domain authority stacking should not be the first method to start with for the simple reason that it isn't needed in a lot of cases. So when considering that there is a financial and/or time investment, I would only use this approach as
required. So, if you find yourself in an impossibly competitive niche, or
things have actually ended up being stuck when ranking, this might be worth
considering as part of a larger ranking strategy.
To see a quick step by step tutorial on using IFTTT for domain authority stacking see the video below:
