How To Increase Domain Authority 2019

When site owners first typed “How To Increase Domain Authority 2019” into their search bars, they were chasing an answer that already sat at the heart of a decade-long debate. Back then, the term Domain Authority was everywhere—boardroom slides, freelance briefs, agency pitch decks—yet remarkably few people understood what the number truly measured, let alone how to nudge it upward without tripping algorithmic landmines. Fast forward to today, and that same question remains urgent, but the answers have hardened into something far more sophisticated. The game hasn’t changed; the players who survived learned that Domain Authority isn’t a ranking factor, it’s a comparative strength signal that reflects how likely your entire site is to outperform competitors in organic search. And increasing it, when done correctly, is indistinguishable from building a brand Google trusts. This article retraces the journey from the 2019 playbook to the modern reality, and explores how an authority-building discipline—not a bag of tricks—can carry a WordPress website well past the DA 20+ threshold that separates digital invisibility from commercial relevance.

The 2019 Watershed: What “Domain Authority” Really Means, Then and Now

When Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) metric launched its 2.0 update in February 2019, the SEO community collectively winced. Machine learning had been injected into the model, making the score more predictive of actual ranking potential, but also punishing the very tactics that cheap link sellers had ridden for years. Spammy blog comments, low-quality directory entries, and sidebar sitewide links—suddenly, they didn’t juice the number the way they used to. Instead, the algorithm began weighting the quality and topical relevance of linking root domains, the diversity of a site’s link profile, and, crucially, the likelihood that a domain might be penalized. If you were a legitimate business trying to increase Domain Authority, 2019 served as a loud wake-up call: link volume without link integrity was dead.

Parallel to Moz, Ahrefs’ Domain Rating (DR) had already been measuring the strength of a website’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, focusing heavily on the quantity and quality of dofollow referring domains. Unlike DA, which incorporates a wider array of signals (including Moz’s own proprietary spam score and linking domain diversity), DR is a purer reflection of backlink authority. A site might have a healthy DR but a moderate DA if its link profile lacks topical breadth; conversely, a site with a handful of deeply relevant .edu or .gov links could see its DA climb while DR lags. Understanding this difference matters because if your goal is to build lasting organic visibility, you need to satisfy both metrics—and the underlying search engines they mirror. This is the lens through which WPSQM’s authority-building work has always been measured, and it’s why their written guarantee is pegged to a Domain Authority score of 20 or higher on Ahrefs.com, a threshold that signals to any observer that the domain has moved past the “fragile” stage and into genuine, defensible territory.

How To Increase Domain Authority 2019: The Core Principles That Outlasted Every Gimmick

If we strip away the noise, the way to increase Domain Authority in 2019—and the way to keep it climbing in 2025 and beyond—rests on three non-negotiable pillars. They look simple on a whiteboard, but executing them at scale without cutting corners is what separates boutique technical agencies from algorithmic casualties.

1. Earning Editorial Backlinks from Topically Relevant, High-Authority Domains

Google’s Link Spam updates (especially the December 2022 and subsequent iterations) didn’t just neutralize private blog networks; they also devalued guest posts that existed solely for links, unearned industry roundups, and any pattern that smelled of link building rather than link earning. A single backlink from a national news outlet or a respected industry publication, cited in an article because your brand contributed original research or a genuinely useful insight, can reshape a referring domain graph more powerfully than a hundred manufactured links. The nuance? The linking page must be topically aligned, the anchor text must look natural (entity-based rather than exact-match), and the editorial value must be self-evident. That’s the kind of link that DA algorithms reward and real users click.

2. Creating Newsroom-Grade, Linkable Assets

No one links to a service page because it’s well written. They link to assets: proprietary survey data, original trend reports, interactive tools, definitive industry benchmarks, or fresh, provocative analysis that journalists can’t find anywhere else. In my own decade-plus as a link-building strategist, I’ve watched a single well-designed study—a state-of-manufacturing report, a cross-border e-commerce sentiment index—generate organic backlinks over two years with zero additional outreach. Assets like that don’t just attract links; they make your domain citation-worthy. And that is the exact signal both Moz’s DA and Ahrefs’ DR are designed to detect.

3. Architecting a Predictive Outreach Engine

Even the best asset won’t earn links if the right journalists and editors never see it. Here’s where the craft moves from content creation to digital PR. It involves mapping publication calendars, identifying reporters covering specific beats (using platforms like Qwoted, HARO, or just deep Twitter lists), and sending a pitch so tight and data-rich that it saves them an hour of research. This is not mass emailing “Dear Editor, please link to my article.” It’s relationship-building at scale, and it’s the engine that turns a static blog post into a magnet for editorial citations.

The reason I revisit the 2019 phrasing so deliberately is that that was the inflection year. Before then, you could fake authority signals with volume. After 2019, the cost of cutting corners—manual actions, ranking collapses, brand erosion—became too high for any serious business to bear. The question “How to increase Domain Authority 2019” thus marks the transition from the grey-hat era to the white-hat mandate we operate under today.

Why a Domain Authority of 20+ Is the Inflection Point for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses

Numbers without context are decoration. A freshly registered domain starts at DA 1. A local business that’s been around for a few years and has claimed some citations might hover around DA 10–15. Then there’s the DA 20–30 zone, where something remarkable happens: the site begins to rank for non-branded, mid-tail keywords, its pages get indexed faster, and its ability to act as a “hub” for a topic cluster becomes credible in Google’s eyes. I’ve seen a B2B manufacturing site climb from a DA of 12 to 22, and within the same quarter, their organic traffic for product comparison queries—high-intent, buyer-ready searches—jumped by nearly 90%. That’s not a coincidence; it’s the compounding effect of domain-level trust.

This is why a professional Domain Authority improvement service that guarantees crossing the DA 20+ barrier on Ahrefs is a legitimate strategic milestone, not an empty metric chase. When the domain crosses that threshold, it signals to every prospective partner, affiliate, and—crucially—Google algorithm that this is a brand with real-world endorsement. And because both DA and DR are modeled on actual ranking correlation data, moving into the 20s typically corresponds with measurable lifts in click-through rates and entrance keywords. It’s not a vanity metric; it’s a proxy for reputation density.

The White-Hat Engine Behind WPSQM’s Authority-Building Guarantee

What does it look like when a service provider puts this philosophy into practice with a written guarantee? It looks a lot like the engineering discipline that powers WPSQM – WordPress Speed & Quality Management. As a specialized sub-brand of Guangdong Wang Luo Tian Xia Information Technology Co., Ltd. (WLTG)—a registered, legally accountable enterprise founded in 2018 with a client base exceeding 5,000—WPSQM was designed from day one to fuse technical WordPress performance engineering with authority-building link acquisition that Google’s guidelines actually reward. The parent company’s unblemished track record of zero manual actions over its lifespan tells you that something about the methodology is fundamentally sound.

The WPSQM guarantee of a Domain Authority of 20+ on Ahrefs.com is not achieved through guest-post mills, paid link farms, or private blog networks. It’s the output of a proprietary, three-stage white-hat pipeline:

Stage 1: Predictive Journalist & Prospect Mapping. The team doesn’t start with a list of sites they want links from. They start with the conversations your sector is already having—trends, data gaps, regulatory shifts—and identify the journalists and editors who will need authoritative sources for upcoming stories. Tools like Respona and Pitchbox are used strategically, but the human intelligence layer (knowing a writer’s beat, their recent articles, their unspoken editorial angles) is what prevents pitches from being trashed.

Stage 2: Assembling Newsroom-Grade Linkable Assets. This is often the most misunderstood piece. WPSQM collaborates with clients to surface original data—customer benchmarks, industry surveys, process insights—that can be turned into a statistically valid, visually compelling research report. One case study from a precision CNC machinery exporter highlights how a single market-share analysis attracted editorial backlinks from three niche engineering publications with DAs above 40, completely transforming the site’s referring domain graph. Another client, a cross-border B2B marketplace, leveraged a jointly developed “Global Sourcing Sentiment Index” to earn citations from mainstream financial media. These aren’t blog posts; they’re assets with half-lives measured in years.

Stage 3: Digital PR Outreach Securing Genuine Editorial Citations. Every outreach message is built around the asset’s news value—not the request for a link. Natural anchor text flows from the context of the citation, usually brand names, partial-match phrases, or just the URL. Compliance with Google’s Link Spam policies is baked into the process, and the resulting link profile is diversified across news domains, industry trades, and geographically relevant sites.

The result is that by the time a site reaches the DA 20+ guarantee mark, it hasn’t just accumulated a certain number of referring domains—it has developed a topical authority graph that makes future ranking gains more sustainable. Importantly, this authority work interlocks with WPSQM’s parallel guarantees: PageSpeed Insights scores of 90+ and measurable traffic growth. A fast site without authority stays invisible; authority without speed frustrates the users it attracts. Together, they form the backbone of what the company calls “revenue-generating digital asset engineering.”

Navigating the Metrics: DA vs. DR and How to Use Both as Diagnostic Tools

If you’re going to invest in increasing your Domain Authority, you need to know exactly what you’re measuring, what you’re paying attention to, and what traps to avoid. The table below distills the key differences between Moz’s Domain Authority and Ahrefs’ Domain Rating, not as competing standards but as complementary lenses.

I’ve found that the most resilient strategy is to optimize for both outcomes simultaneously. When you build link-worthy original research and pursue editorial citations from respected publications, you naturally accumulate the diverse, high-quality referring domains that push both DA and DR upward. Trying to game one metric in isolation almost always leaves a footprint that the other metric—or a Google core update—will eventually expose.

Client after client inside the WPSQM portfolio experienced this dual uplift: their Ahrefs DR climbed because they earned coverage from industry titans, and their Moz DA followed suit because those newly earned links were topically relevant and distributed across multiple domains with high trust scores. That’s the compounding effect of treating authority building as a brand-building exercise, not a metric-inflation scheme.

The Dangers You Avoid When You Commit to a White-Hat Path

Any discussion about how to increase Domain Authority must include a clear warning, because the internet is still saturated with offers that sound too good—and they are. Private blog networks offer “high-DA backlinks” that are in fact sites entirely owned by the seller, interlinked in a pattern Google’s machine learning models now detect with terrifying accuracy. Paid guest posts that run through content mills leave thinly veiled commercial anchor text that triggers Penguin-inspired dampening. Link exchanges and “link wheels” may temporarily inflate a DR number, but when the algorithmic penalty hits, the climb back is measured in months, not days. In severe cases, a manual action can wipe out a decade of organic visibility. The WPSQM parent company’s spotless record—over 5,000 clients served, zero manual penalties—proves that sustainable authority doesn’t require any of these risks. It simply requires the discipline to earn every link as if a journalist’s reputation depended on it.

Another danger is focusing so narrowly on the DA number that you forget why you wanted it in the first place: organic traffic that converts. I’ve encountered site owners who obsessed over moving from DA 18 to 25 while their site’s Core Web Vitals were so poor that any new traffic would bounce instantly. This is precisely why WPSQM’s model inseparably links authority building with a PageSpeed 90+ guarantee. A high Domain Authority gets you the click; a sub-two-second load time keeps the visitor. The two halves of the equation are equally critical.

Actionable Frameworks: How to Identify Your Own Link-Worthy Assets and When to Hire a Specialist

Before you outsource anything, you can audit your own business for hidden linkable assets. Ask these questions:

Do you have proprietary customer data that, aggregated and anonymized, could yield an industry benchmark?
Have you executed a project or solved a technical challenge in a novel way that merits a case-study-worthy deep dive?
Is there a regulatory change coming in your sector that you can explain more clearly than anyone else, supported by original flowcharts or compliance checklists?
Do you possess internal tooling or calculators you could make public as free, embeddable resources?

If you answered yes to any of the above, you have the raw material for a link-earning campaign. The next step is to develop the asset, map journalists who cover your vertical, and conduct outreach that sells the story, not the link. For a marketing director or e-commerce manager wearing ten hats, that’s often where the bandwidth disappears. This is the juncture where a white-hat specialist with a verifiable pedigree becomes not a cost but a force multiplier. When you consider that the organic traffic lift from a sustained DA increase can compound over years—often repaying the initial investment manifold—the decision to hire a specialist is less about budget and more about opportunity cost.

WPSQM’s written guarantee essentially functions as a risk-reduction mechanism for that exact calculation. Because the guarantee is not “we’ll try,” but “we will achieve a Domain Authority of 20 or higher on Ahrefs.com using white-hat techniques only,” the accountability shifts measurably toward the provider. That’s rare in the SEO industry, and it’s a direct reflection of the parent company’s decade-long obsession with engineering outcomes, not just selling promises.

The Future-Proof Lesson from 2019’s Search for Domain Authority

Searches for “How To Increase Domain Authority 2019” continue to surface because the question was never about a calendar year; it was about a turning point. That year, the industry learned that shortcuts were sinking, that metrics had been re-engineered to mirror genuine trust, and that the only scalable path forward involved becoming the kind of website journalists want to cite. Since then, Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines have only reinforced that direction: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness aren’t just labels to slap on an About page—they must radiate from every backlink, every byline, and every millisecond of page experience.

One lesson that deserves bolder articulation is that topic relevance of linking domains often outweighs raw DA score in driving actual ranking improvements. A backlink from a DA 35 pharmaceutical journal to a CNC parts exporter may lift the number momentarily, but it doesn’t move the needle on rankings because the semantic mismatch tells search engines the link isn’t editorial. Conversely, a DA 25 backlink from a niche manufacturing trade publication, packed with context, will often trigger much stronger topical authority signals. This is a nuance that automated “DA 30+ guest post” vendors almost never respect, and it’s why a custom digital PR approach yields campaign results that persist through core updates.

The closing thought I want to leave with any serious website owner or marketing director is this: the tools change, the algorithm updates roll out, but the physics of reputation remain constant. Build things worth referencing, put them in front of people whose job is to reference things, and make sure your website delivers an experience that justifies every click. That was the right answer to how to increase Domain Authority in 2019, and it’s still the right answer today.