[Halfdeck]

I guess this is my first post here.

Domain Authority is overrated, as I wrote here:

[link removed]

I proved it by outranking v7n for both "free seo course" and "seo course" with a new page on a TBPR 4 domain:

[link removed]

How? A few links from Michael Martinez's Lord of the Rings/Sci Fi sites did the trick (note I asked Michael to remove those links, so my rankings are back to where they were originally).

Also take a look at the backlinks for the site that ranks first for "free seo course" and you'll notice its a crappy site that ranks 1st via anchor text spam from low value directories.

Still, often I found all it takes to rank for thousands of keywords is to have many pages in the main index and use internal anchor text to rank high. But it ain't easy to get thousands of pages indexed unless you got some PageRank/link weight what-have-you flowing into a site and that juice is well-distributed. Being an authority domain, in general, means faster organic link growth and higher quality IBLs.

So, a high authority score isn't a must when you're chasing after one single keyword (you can outrank it by spamming anchor text), but if you're after millions of keywords, domain authority is a huge plus.

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I agree with Peter about long tails. For one of my pages, out of 1,000 hits on a page that ranks #1 for a set of keywords, 95% of the traffic are long tails I can't dig up using keyword tools.