Domain authority

Domain authority explained

Domain Authority, often shortened to DA, is a score from 1 to 100 created by the SEO software company Moz. It estimates how likely a whole website is to rank, based mainly on the links pointing to it. It's a third-party prediction. Google doesn't use it, doesn't calculate it and has said many times that it has no single "authority" score of this kind.

How it affects trust

You'll meet DA in sales emails ("we'll get you DA 50 links!") and in agency reports. It's a handy way to compare link profiles roughly, but it says nothing about whether your pages answer searches well. A local plumber with a modest score can easily outrank a national site for a search in their own town.

Risky habits

• Treating DA as a Google ranking factor.
• Buying links because of a site's score.
• Panicking when the number drops. Tool scores change when their data or formula changes.
• Comparing your score with sites in completely different markets.

A realistic example

A web designer is offered a "DA 70 guest post" for £150. The site turns out to publish articles on any topic for anyone who pays. The score is high because of old links, but the site is irrelevant to her clients and the link would be a paid one, which breaches Google's link spam rules. She declines and spends the money elsewhere.

How to review yours

Moz offers a free tool to look up a site's score, and other tools have similar metrics under different names. If you look, compare yourself with genuine local competitors rather than chasing a number. Pay more attention to which relevant sites link to you, which you can see free in Search Console's Links report.

Related link terms

• Domain Rating: Ahrefs' third-party score for a site's backlink profile strength.
• Backlink: A link from another website to yours; a classic off-page signal.
• Keyword difficulty: Third-party estimates of how hard it is to rank for a term.