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20+ Major News Sites Ranked by Domain Authority

February 1, 2010 by Adam Sherk

When it comes to competing for search engine visibility, major news organizations tend to benefit from having strong, trusted domains. But just how strong are those domains?

Using SEOmoz’s new Open Site Explorer I did a head-to-head comparison of 20+ news sites to see which had the most domain authority.

To calculate the scores, SEOmoz uses an amalgamation of link metrics to create a single predictive score for each domain. They refer to domain authority as “our best prediction about how content would perform in search engine rankings on one site vs. another” and claim an accuracy range of about 70%.

So without further ado, here are 20+ major news sites ranked by domain authority and home page authority:

DomainDomain authorityHome page authority
1news.bbc.co.uk9992
2economist.com9990
nytimes.com9990
4msnbc.msn.com9789
5cnn.com9692
6abcnews.go.com9690
7online.wsj.com9591
time.com9591
9usatoday.com9591
10washingtonpost.com9590
11forbes.com9589
guardian.co.uk9589
13latimes.com9490
14timesonline.co.uk9490
15foxnews.com9489
telegraph.co.uk9489
17huffingtonpost.com9487
npr.org9487
19cbsnews.com9389
csmonitor.com9389
21chicagotribune.com9289
22newsweek.com9189

In the table home page authority is used to break any ties; if both scores are equal the sites are listed in alphabetical order.

As you can see all of the news sites have domain authority scores of at least 90, and three have scores of 99. Some of these news organizations might like to remember that Google actually holds them in high regard and sends a nice chunk of natural search traffic their way.

I was surprised to see The Economist in the top three because of their subscription wall, but more of their content seems to be accessible to search engines these days.

Related posts:

  1. 25 Major News Sites Ranked by Page Speed
  2. Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement?
  3. The Top News Sites on Blekko
  4. The Fastest and Slowest News Sites in 2012
  5. News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact?

Comments

  1. Nick Stamoulis says

    February 3, 2010 at 7:12 am

    This is a very interesting list and seems accurate. Did you pick these news sites based on visitors to each or, did you just pick out news sites that you like and read to include into this study. Either way, it seems like you covered all of the major news sites.

  2. Adam Sherk says

    February 3, 2010 at 12:06 pm

    Thanks Nick. I tried to put together a representative sampling of major newspapers, news magazines and TV news sites. I didn’t have an exact methodology; I’d done some previous posts on Facebook, Twitter and Digg for news sites, so I started with those lists and then added some sites that others had suggested. I also wanted to include at least a few UK news sites.

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About Adam Sherk

Adam Sherk is an SEO and PR consultant helping publishers with digital strategy and audience development, including enterprise SEO, public relations and social media marketing.

Adam is VP SEO and Digital Strategy for Define Media Group.

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