India's top travel bloggers with highest DA

In the past I have made two data driven three blogger lists.

#1 India's senior most travel bloggers (based on when they started blogging) 

#2 India's top travel bloggers by traffic (similarweb) and one more

#3 Chennai's top active bloggers

Reason for these lists was that there are dozens of top bloggers list out there but without disclosing their evaluation criteria, how many blogs were considered and other parameters. Most top blogger lists are released by sites with no authority or credibility as a mean to gain some visibility for themselves when these bloggers share the list, while others are often recycled pieces from previous lists or someone's personal discretion without others knowing why someone got included or excluded.

Thus I decided to publish my own lists, but purely based on a specific criteria that is open for everyone to scrutinize.

In this post, I am making an attempt to list travel bloggers from India with highest DA or Domain Authority. DA is a score between 0 and 100, higher the better and gives an indication of multiple factors- quality of inbound and outbound links, number of links, age of the domain, potential popularity in search engines and other factors. The exact logic is not in public domain but since last one decade, DA has managed to replace PR or Google assigned Page Rank (a number between 0 to 10) as a measure of credibility and popularity of a site.

Thus DA is one of the several factors to decide how good or bad a site is. I checked DA of about 150 travel blogs in India and below is how the numbers fare. 

Criteria used:

• Bloggers who were previously featured in my lists-I checked DA of their blog manually myself.
• I also floated a registration form for people to submit their blog details if they would like to be included in this list- those who submitted were analysed for their DA and included
• Only those with strong India connection were considered. This list doesn't feature international bloggers. Group/community blogs were also excluded. Couple blogs included.

Key findings

• Highest or maximum DA I could find among Indian travel bloggers is about 50+. On a scale of 100, 50 seems small, but that is probably the best individual bloggers can aim for. World's most popular websites like Google.com, facebook.com have DA of about 95-96 with their billion dollar budgets and army of 1000s of employees. Among personal blogs Shoutmeloud.com has DA of 74, nomadicmatt has DA of 75, so these are achievable targets.
• A small percentage (7%) of Indian travel bloggers have their DA between 40-50. Actually between 40 and 45. Couldn't find anyone between 45-50.
• Majority of fairly well known travel bloggers (24%) have their DA between 30 and 40
• DA of 20 to 30 constitutes almost 44% of Indian travel blogs. 
• DA of below 20 is about 22% of the blogs.

Without further delay, let us get to the list.

Top Tier: Top Indian Travel bloggers with DA of 50+

Shivya Nath, Mariellen and Rachel are the only 3 Indian/India based bloggers with DA 50+ If you are aware of anyone else, do let me know. Rachel Jones is no more, that leaves us only 2.

Top Indian Travel bloggers with DA of 40-49

Below are the 11 Indian bloggers with DA between 40 and 49. They don't need any introduction. Most of them were also part of my bloggers with highest traffic list or India's senior most travel bloggers list.

Top Indian Travel Bloggers with DA 35-39

Top Indian Travel bloggers with DA between 30 and 34

So this forms almost 52 travel bloggers with decent (30-40) and high (40+) Domain Authority among Indian travel bloggers community. Almost another 100+ bloggers have DA 29 or less. 

Please note:

• This list is manually made by evaluating about 150 Indian travel blog. If you have a high DA travel blog meeting above criteria but not listed, please mention in comments. Any comment received for next one week I will evaluate and update. Those received later, may be in next edition.
• My apologies if this list doesn't feature your blog. It is purely data driven list and no personal bias or assessment is involved. Your blog will probably feature in some other criteria or may be next year as your numbers improve. Best wishes. Feel free to make your own list.
• I've included the list as an image-because too many outgoing links in a post may flag my post as a spam for search engines and also I want PR or others to put some effort and search/browse these sites, than simply copy pasting. 

Let us clear some air about DA

Q1: Is DA permanent?

DA is not permanent. DA gets revised periodically so there could be some movement in DA number. Use your discretion. DA mentioned here was accurate at the time of compiling this post.

Q2: Is DA ultimate metrics for a site?

No. DA is one of the several measures used to evaluate how effective a site or blog is. Monthly traffic, page views etc are some other metrics.  It is possible a site with low DA may have higher traffic than another site with high DA or your personal assessment of quality/usefulness may differ despite what DA number indicate. Many sites with DA because of historical activity might be inactive now, several really good bloggers working hard and putting in quality content may need another year before their DA increases to respectable levels. While DA is a good measure for initial shortlisting, nothing beats human judgment. Do check these blogs for quality, relevance and other factors and take a final decision.

Q3: Can DA be manipulated?

It is not impossible, but it is relatively hard for normal blogger. In order to manipulate DA artificially one has to spend money to buy links from willing high authority sites, some SEO experts buy expired high DA sites and then use it to link to sites they want to boost and such under the carpet tricks can be employed by those determined to boost their domain authority. But it is relatively more complex and expensive compared to say buying followers on Instagram. It is hard to detect as well. I am hoping all bloggers in this list got their DA naturally. Spam score given in DA checker tools is a kind of indication towards low quality of inbound/outbound links of a blog. (around 2-3% might be impossible to avoid, but 5%+ should be a worry)

Q4: What about PA?

Page Authority or PA is average of authority number assigned to all individual pages of a blog. Generally DA and PA go in tandem. Sites with high DA also carry high PA but there could be exceptions.

Ways to boost your domain authority

1. Write good content. There is no better tip than this. If you content is good and useful to readers, everything else will fall in place over a period of time. Other than that, most general tips to increase your blog's visibility and traffic also works towards increasing DA.

2. Watch out what kind of links you give. Many bloggers with high DA are very selective on their linking- they won't link to you if your DA is too less than theirs, they won't link to any 3rd party sites not of excellent standings. Particularly selling links for money to low authority sites could backfire in near future.

3. Try to gain more links- by offering guest posts, writing comments, requesting for contextual link where possible/relevant etc

4. Have strong internal linking. Link to few other relevant posts, link from old post to new post and new post to old post, for related topics.

5. Try for better visibility on social media. More shares bring more traffic and better recognition.

I do not claim to be an expert in DA. Even my Blog's DA is only about 33, I have a long way to go to reach 40+

Do share your thoughts and tips.