What Is Domain Authority and How to Improve It

Last Tuesday a client emailed me — all caps in the subject line — asking, "WHAT IS MY DOMAIN AUTHORITY AND WHY IS IT SO LOW?" The site was pulling in decent organic traffic. Rankings were climbing for several target keywords. Revenue from search had gone up 30% over the previous quarter. But none of that mattered because someone had told them their DA was 24, and apparently that was supposed to be terrifying.

Key Takeaways

• The Number Everyone Loves to Worship
• The DA Obsession Problem
• What DA Is Actually Good For
• So How Do You Actually Improve It
• The Stuff Nobody Mentions
• The Real Question Nobody Asks

I sat there for a minute staring at the email. Not because the question was hard. Because the answer is complicated in a way that most people don't want to hear. Domain Authority isn't what most people think it is. And the obsession with raising it has probably caused more wasted effort in SEO than almost anything else I can think of.

So let's talk about it. All of it. The good parts, the misleading parts, the parts that make experienced SEOs roll their eyes when clients bring it up in meetings.

The Number Everyone Loves to Worship

Domain Authority — DA — is a metric created by Moz. Not Google. Moz. A private company that sells SEO software. They built a scoring system from 1 to 100 that's supposed to predict how likely a website is to rank in search results. Higher score, better chances. Simple enough on the surface.

But here's where people get tripped up. Google does not use Domain Authority. They don't look at it. They don't factor it into rankings. It's not part of any algorithm update. It's not hiding in some secret ranking signal. Google has their own internal systems for evaluating sites, and Moz's DA score isn't one of them. Moz is essentially trying to reverse-engineer something Google does, packaging that guess into a tidy number. This is closely related to what we cover in How to Analyze Your Backlink Profile Like a Pro.

That doesn't make DA useless. It makes it a proxy. An estimate. A rough approximation of something real but unknowable. Like trying to guess someone's credit score based on their car and their neighborhood. You might be in the ballpark, but you're not looking at the actual data.

Moz calculates DA primarily based on a site's backlink profile — how many links point to it, how authoritative those linking sites are, and a bunch of other factors they feed into a machine learning model. They update it periodically. The exact weighting changes over time. It's a proprietary black box sitting on top of another proprietary black box, which is Google's actual algorithm.

And yet. People lose sleep over this number. They make business decisions based on it. They reject guest post opportunities because the target site's DA is "only" 30. They pay money — sometimes a lot of money — to services that promise to raise their DA by some number of points per month. Which is... something we need to talk about.

The DA Obsession Problem

I've been doing this long enough to remember when nobody talked about Domain Authority. PageRank was the vanity metric of choice back then, and when Google stopped publicly updating the toolbar PageRank, there was a vacuum. Moz's DA stepped in to fill it, and the SEO world latched on like it was oxygen.

The problem with any single number that claims to represent something as complex as search rankings is that people start optimizing for the number instead of the thing the number is supposed to represent. It's Goodhart's Law in action — when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

I've seen agencies pitch clients on "DA improvement packages." They'll build a bunch of links from high-DA sites, and sure enough, the client's DA goes up a few points. Everyone celebrates. But the traffic doesn't move. Rankings don't budge. Because the links were from irrelevant sites, or from link farms that happen to have inflated DA scores themselves, or from pages that no real human would ever visit.

The DA went up. The actual authority of the site? Unchanged. Maybe even damaged, depending on what kinds of links were built.

This is the trap. DA measures what Moz thinks authority looks like. Google measures what Google thinks authority looks like. Those two things overlap, but they're not the same thing, and the gap between them is where a lot of wasted money and effort lives. To understand this better, take a look at Backlink Quality vs Quantity: What Matters More for SEO.

I had a competitor analysis recently where a client's main rival had a DA of 45 while my client sat at 28. The client was panicking. But when we dug into actual keyword rankings, my client was outranking the competitor for nearly every money keyword that mattered. The rival had a higher DA because they had more backlinks overall, many of them from random directories and low-quality guest posts accumulated over years. My client had fewer links but they were from relevant, respected sites in their industry. Google clearly saw the difference even if Moz's scoring didn't.

What DA Is Actually Good For

Alright, I've been beating up on DA pretty hard. Let me back off a bit, because there are legitimate uses for it.

As a relative comparison tool, it's not bad. If you're evaluating potential sites for outreach and one has a DA of 65 while another has a DA of 12, that difference probably means something. The higher-DA site likely has a more established backlink profile, more content, more history. It's a rough filter, and rough filters have value when you're sorting through hundreds of prospects.

It's also decent for tracking your own trajectory over time. If your DA was 18 six months ago and it's 26 now, something is working. Your backlink profile is growing, and Moz's model is recognizing that growth. It's not proof that your rankings will improve, but it's a signal pointing in the right direction.

Where DA falls apart is when people treat it as a precise measurement. The difference between a DA of 31 and a DA of 34 is basically noise. It could shift with Moz's next index update without anything changing on the site. Comparing sites within a narrow DA range and drawing conclusions from the differences is reading tea leaves.

And the logarithmic scale catches people off guard. Going from DA 20 to DA 30 is much easier than going from DA 60 to DA 70. The higher you go, the more effort each point requires. It's not linear. A lot of people set goals like "I want to reach DA 50 by end of year" without understanding that the effort required depends enormously on where they're starting from.

There's also Ahrefs Domain Rating — DR — which confuses things further. It's a similar concept, different calculation, different scale behavior. A site might have a DA of 40 and a DR of 55. Neither number is wrong exactly; they're just measuring slightly different things in slightly different ways. I've had clients show me their DR score thinking it was their DA and vice versa. The whole world of third-party authority metrics is a mess if you're not careful about which tool you're looking at.

So How Do You Actually Improve It

Setting aside whether you should be chasing DA improvements specifically — and I'll get back to that — here's what actually moves the number, because I know some of you just want the tactical stuff. Our article on The Complete Guide to Backlink Monitoring Tools explores this idea in more depth.

Backlinks are the biggest factor. More links from higher-authority sites will push your DA up. That's the core of it. But not all links are equal in Moz's model, and building garbage links might temporarily inflate your score while doing nothing for your actual search performance. I've seen sites with artificially inflated DA scores get absolutely hammered when Google catches up.

The quality of referring domains matters more than the raw count. Fifty links from fifty different legitimate websites will do more for your DA than five hundred links from five spammy sites. Moz's algorithm tries to account for this, weighting links from authoritative sources more heavily.

Content that earns links naturally is the most sustainable path. I know that sounds like generic advice, but it's generic because it's true. Original research, data studies, useful tools, genuinely helpful guides — these attract links without you having to ask for them. And those unsolicited editorial links carry weight in both Moz's model and Google's algorithm.

Guest posting still works if you're doing it on relevant, real sites with actual audiences. Writing a thoughtful piece for an industry publication that links back to your site is legitimate. Mass-producing thin guest posts across hundreds of random blogs is the kind of thing that might bump your DA while putting your site at risk with Google. The distinction matters.

Internal linking structure plays a smaller role, but it's there. Moz crawls your site and evaluates how link equity flows through it. A well-structured internal linking setup helps distribute authority from your stronger pages to the ones that need it. This probably matters more for your actual rankings than for your DA score specifically, but it's worth doing regardless.

Technical health factors in, too. If Moz's crawler can't access large portions of your site, or if you have massive crawl errors, that can suppress your DA. Making sure your site is crawlable, fast, and properly structured isn't going to dramatically change your score, but it removes obstacles.

Disavowing toxic backlinks is something people ask about a lot. If you've inherited a bunch of spammy links — from a previous owner, from a negative SEO attack, from old link building campaigns you'd rather forget — those might be dragging your DA down. Moz does try to discount obvious spam, but their spam detection isn't perfect. Using Google's disavow tool won't directly affect your DA since Moz uses their own index, but it can help your actual search performance, which is what matters.

The Stuff Nobody Mentions

Here's something that doesn't come up enough. Your DA can drop even when you're doing everything right. Moz recalculates periodically, and when they update their link index or adjust their algorithm, scores shift. I've had panicked calls from clients whose DA dropped five points overnight. Nothing changed on their site. No links were lost. Moz just updated their model. Related reading: Competitor Backlink Analysis: Tools and Techniques.

It's also relative. DA is partially based on how your site compares to others in Moz's index. If a bunch of other sites gain links faster than you, your DA can stagnate or decline even while your absolute link profile is growing. It's like grading on a curve — your performance depends partly on everyone else's.

New domains almost always start with a DA of 1. Getting from 1 to 10 is pretty achievable with some basic link building. Getting from 10 to 20 takes more sustained effort. Past 30, you need consistently strong content and link acquisition over months or years. Past 50, you're generally looking at well-established brands with years of accumulated backlinks. Past 70? That's mostly major publications, tech companies, universities, government sites. If someone tells you they can get your new site to DA 70 in six months, they're either lying or doing something that's going to blow up eventually.

The age of your domain plays an indirect role. Older domains have had more time to accumulate backlinks, build content, and establish topical relevance. But age alone doesn't boost DA — it's what the site has done over that time. A ten-year-old domain that's been sitting dormant won't score higher than a two-year-old site that's been actively building quality content and earning links.

Social signals, by the way, don't directly affect DA. Moz has been pretty clear about this. Having a viral tweet or a massively shared Facebook post won't move your score unless those social shares result in actual backlinks from websites. Social media is a distribution channel for link-worthy content, not a DA signal in itself.

The Real Question Nobody Asks

Should you even care about DA? Honestly? Sort of. It's a useful shorthand, a quick gut check, one data point among many. But it shouldn't be a KPI. It shouldn't be the metric you report to your boss or your client as evidence that your SEO strategy is working.

Traffic is what matters. Rankings for keywords that drive revenue matter. Conversions from organic search matter. The number of referring domains from relevant sites matters. DA is a derivative of some of those things, but it's a noisy derivative that can mislead you if you treat it as the primary signal.

I've started telling clients to check their DA once a quarter at most. Look at the trend. If it's going up, great, keep doing what you're doing. If it's going down, investigate whether you've lost significant backlinks or if Moz just adjusted their scoring. Either way, spend 95% of your attention on the metrics that directly correlate with business outcomes.

The best SEO campaigns I've worked on barely mentioned DA. The teams focused on creating content that answered real questions, building relationships with journalists and bloggers in their space, fixing technical issues that were holding back crawlability, and gradually earning links through genuine value. Their DA went up as a side effect. It was a lagging indicator of good work, not a leading target. We cover this in more detail in PageRank Explained: How Google Values Links.

There's something a bit funny about the whole industry's relationship with this metric. We know it's imperfect. We know Google doesn't use it. We know it can be gamed. And yet it persists as the first thing clients ask about and the first thing agencies promise to improve. Maybe it's because a single number feels tangible in a way that "we improved your topical authority through a sustained content strategy targeting mid-funnel informational queries" doesn't. People want a score. A grade. Something they can watch go up and feel good about.

I get it. I just wish the industry would be more honest about what that score actually represents.

Anyway. If you came here looking for the quick version: DA is a third-party estimate, not a Google metric. It's useful as a rough comparison tool but terrible as a primary goal. Build quality links from relevant sites, create content worth linking to, fix your technical SEO issues, and your DA will take care of itself. Don't pay anyone who promises to raise it by a specific number of points. Don't panic when it fluctuates. Don't turn down a link opportunity just because the site has a DA of 22 — some of the best links I've ever built for clients came from small, niche sites with modest scores but wildly engaged audiences.

The number is just a number. What sits behind it is what actually determines whether your site ranks or not. And that — the messy, complicated, constantly-shifting reality of how Google evaluates your site — is something no single metric can capture. Not DA, not DR, not anything with a score from 1 to 100.

Sometimes I think we'd all be better off if Moz had never invented the thing. But then I remember the client emails would just be about something else. There's always a number people want to fixate on. At least this one points roughly in the right direction, even if everyone's squinting at it way too hard...