TL;DR: Domain Authority is Moz's 1-100 score that predicts how likely a site is to rank. It's not a Google ranking factor — but the signals it measures (backlinks, site quality) absolutely are. Check yours free with our DA checker, then focus on the things that actually improve your rankings.
Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz that scores your website from 1 to 100 based on how likely it is to rank in search results. It looks at things like the number and quality of backlinks pointing to your site, and it spits out a single number that's supposed to represent your site's overall "strength" in search.
That's the textbook definition. Here's the more important one: Domain Authority is a third-party prediction. It is not something Google uses. At all.
I want to be really clear about this because I've had conversations with founders who believe that increasing their DA from 30 to 40 will directly improve their rankings. It won't. Not directly. Google's John Mueller has been about as explicit as a Google employee can be:
"You do not need DA for Google Search. Google doesn't use it at all. If you'd like to level your site up in search, you'd need to focus on something else or at least use other metrics."
— John Mueller, Google (2022), Reddit AMA
Except — as Rand Fishkin reported in May 2024, leaked Google API documentation revealed an internal metric called "siteAuthority" — contradicting years of public denial that any such site-level authority signal existed. Search Engine Land verified and covered the findings extensively.
So Google doesn't use Moz's DA. But they apparently have their own version of the concept. (I should mention — this is one of those situations where the SEO community collectively went "I knew it" while also being surprised. Watching the same people who'd spent years repeating "Google doesn't use domain authority" pivot to "well, obviously they have something similar" was quite something.)
One thing that trips people up about DA is the scale. It's logarithmic, not linear. Going from DA 10 to DA 20 is relatively straightforward — build some decent content, earn a handful of quality backlinks. Going from DA 60 to DA 70? That might take years. And going from DA 80 to DA 90? You're competing with sites like Wikipedia and the New York Times. The difficulty increases exponentially at each level, which means you shouldn't compare your progress to a site that started 30 points above you.
I run SEOJuice at a DA of roughly 30-something. We're a two-person company competing in SEO tools — a space dominated by companies with DAs in the 80s and 90s. Do I care about our DA? Honestly, only as a directional metric. It tells me whether our backlink profile is growing or shrinking over time. That's about the extent of its usefulness for me.
DA isn't the only authority metric out there. Ahrefs has Domain Rating (DR), Semrush has Authority Score (AS), and they all measure roughly the same concept — just differently enough to be confusing.
| Metric | Provider | Scale | Primary Inputs | Key Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Domain Authority (DA) | Moz | 1-100 | Link quantity, quality, spam score, root domains | Predicts ranking probability; uses machine learning model trained on SERPs |
| Domain Rating (DR) | Ahrefs | 0-100 | Backlink profile strength (quantity and quality of referring domains) | Purely backlink-based; doesn't factor in content or traffic |
| Authority Score (AS) | Semrush | 0-100 | Organic traffic, backlinks, spam signals | Blends traffic data with link data; more holistic but also more opaque |
Here's what actually matters: none of these are "right" or "wrong." They're different lenses on the same underlying reality. Ahrefs DR is the most straightforward — it's almost entirely about backlinks, which makes it easy to understand but also easy to game. Moz DA tries to predict actual ranking performance, which is more ambitious but also means it can feel disconnected from any single input you control. Semrush AS throws traffic into the mix, which I actually like in theory, but it makes the metric harder to act on.
My honest take? I check Ahrefs DR most often because it gives me the clearest signal about backlink progress specifically. But when I'm evaluating a competitor or a potential link prospect, I'll look at DA too, because it tends to penalize spammy link profiles more aggressively. I've seen sites with a DR of 70 and a DA of 35. That gap almost always means their backlink profile has quality issues.
Don't obsess over which metric is "most accurate." None of them are accurate in the way a thermometer is accurate. They're approximations. Use whichever one your team already has access to, and be consistent about it. Comparing your DA to a competitor's DR is meaningless.
This is the question I get asked most, and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on your niche.
A DA of 25 in competitive finance SEO is basically invisible. A DA of 25 in a niche B2B software category might make you the strongest player. Context is everything.
That said, here are rough benchmarks that hold true across most industries:
| DA Range | What It Means | Typical Sites |
|---|---|---|
| 0-10 | Brand new or very small sites | New blogs, freshly launched startups, personal sites |
| 10-20 | Early traction, minimal backlink profile | Small businesses, niche blogs with some content |
| 20-40 | Established presence, growing authority | Growing startups, regional businesses, active content sites |
| 40-60 | Strong authority, competitive in most niches | Well-known brands, popular blogs, mid-size companies |
| 60-80 | Very strong, dominant in most verticals | Major publications, large companies, established SaaS |
| 80-100 | Elite — among the strongest sites on the web | Google, Wikipedia, NYT, Amazon, government sites |
When I was building SEOJuice, I benchmarked us against other SEO tools in our tier — not against Ahrefs or Semrush. Our DA target was "get above 30 and stay there." Not because 30 is magic, but because that's roughly where we'd start showing up for mid-tail keywords in our space. We track this alongside more granular metrics using our industry benchmark tool.
Here's what I wish someone had told me earlier: chasing a specific DA number is a trap. DA is an output, not an input. You can't directly increase your DA the way you can increase your page count or fix a broken link. It's a reflection of dozens of underlying factors, and focusing on "get DA to 50" instead of "earn 20 quality referring domains this quarter" leads to bad decisions. The number will follow if you do the right work.
I'm not sure whether the average DA thresholds I just listed will hold in two years. The metric gets recalibrated periodically, and as more sites build more links, the bar shifts upward. What was a DA 40 site in 2020 might be a DA 35 site today with the same backlink profile. Keep that in mind when reading old benchmark data.
We built a free DA checker at seojuice.io/tools/domain-authority/.
If you want alternatives, Moz's Link Explorer gives you the "official" DA (it's their metric, after all). Ahrefs' free website checker shows DR. Semrush has their Authority Score available in their domain overview. There are also browser extensions from all three that show scores right in SERPs, which is useful when you're scoping out competition. For a broader look at free tools in this space, I put together a roundup of open source SEO tools that covers the ecosystem.
One tip: check your DA across at least two tools. If Moz says 40 and Ahrefs says 15, that discrepancy tells you something important about your backlink profile that neither number alone reveals.
This is where things get real. DA improvement isn't a hack or a trick — it's a compounding process that takes months to years. Anyone promising "DA 50 in 90 days" is either lying or planning to do something that'll get you penalized.
I'll go through each of these with specific examples, including timelines. Because one thing I've learned from building SEOJuice is that founders don't need more theory — they need to know what to do Monday morning and when to expect results.
Our DA checker page earns links without us doing anything. People writing "how to check domain authority" articles link to tools that actually check domain authority. We didn't pitch anyone — we built something useful and the links followed. That's what a linkable asset is: a page other sites want to reference because it serves their readers.
The best ones I've seen answer questions with original data. "We analyzed 10,000 SaaS homepages and here's what we found" is far more linkable than "10 Tips for Better SaaS Homepages." The data doesn't have to be groundbreaking. It just has to be yours. Free tools, original research, unique datasets — anything where linking to you is the obvious move for someone covering your topic.
I got a link from a DA 75 marketing blog by responding to a HARO query about SEO tool pricing. Took me 15 minutes to write the response. That's an editorial backlink — a journalist or blogger linking to you because your content supports their story, not because you paid or swapped.
Why this matters so much:
"The #1 result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions #2-#10. A site's overall link authority correlates with higher first page rankings."
— Backlinko (2024), analysis of 11.8 million search results
How do you actually earn these? Start by being a source. Sign up for journalist query services (HARO is the most well-known, though it's changed ownership a few times). Respond to queries in your area of expertise with specific, quotable answers. Most responses get ignored — but the ones that land can earn you links from high-DA publications.
Our DA went up about 2 points around the same time as that HARO link, and it was the only notable change in our backlink profile that month. (This still surprises me — one good link can do more than 50 mediocre ones.) Start seeing results in 1-3 months if you're consistent with query responses.
One SaaS company I followed used their own remote-work analytics to create an industry-specific productivity study, pitched it to HR publications, and earned 40+ backlinks from sites with DA 50-80 over six months. That's digital PR — creating newsworthy content from your own data and getting journalists to cover it.
Nobody cares about your new feature launch. What journalists care about is data and stories that help them write better articles for their audience. Original research, surveys, contrarian takes backed by numbers. Results like the example above aren't typical — most campaigns produce more modest gains, maybe 3-5 points of DA over a similar timeframe. But the ceiling is higher here than almost any other link building tactic.
Actually, I should have said this in the comparison section: if you're tracking your progress with Ahrefs DR but evaluating link prospects with Moz DA, you're going to confuse yourself. I did this for months. Pick one metric for tracking your own growth and stick with it. Use the other tools for competitive intelligence, not self-measurement. Mixing them introduces noise that feels like signal.
Sometimes improving DA isn't about getting more links — it's about dealing with the bad ones. Moz's DA calculation factors in spam score, and a bunch of low-quality or spammy backlinks can actively drag your score down.
Check your backlink profile for links from obviously spammy domains — think sites with random character domain names, sites in languages you don't operate in, or link farms with thousands of outbound links on every page. If you find a significant number of these, use Google's Disavow Tool to tell Google you don't want them counted.
A caveat: don't go overboard with disavowing. There's a thread on r/SEO every other week where someone panicked because Semrush showed 200 "toxic" backlinks, disavowed the lot, and tanked their rankings for a month. Most of those flagged links are fine. Only disavow links that are clearly, obviously spam. If you're uncertain about a link, leave it. Google is pretty good at ignoring junk links on their own.
For more on keeping your link building ethical and sustainable, I wrote about ethical SEO practices that covers where the lines are.
I tried a bulk disavow once early on and it was a mistake — our DA actually dipped for a month before recovering. Lesson learned: be surgical, not aggressive.
I'll be blunt about something: most content doesn't deserve links. I've audited sites with 200+ blog posts where maybe 5 of them had any external links at all. The other 195 were thin, undifferentiated, and indistinguishable from the first page of Google results for the same topic. Volume alone won't move DA. Quality that earns citations will.
"96.55% of all pages get zero traffic from Google. Only 2,997 pages with no referring domains get more than 1K monthly search visits — roughly 1 in every 6,671."
— Ahrefs (2023), study of approximately 14 billion pages
For DA purposes, "better content" means content that people cite. Content that becomes a reference point. Not content that merely ranks — content that other creators want to link to when they're writing about the same topic. The two are deeply intertwined: if you're not earning links, you're almost certainly not getting meaningful traffic either.
What actually works: original data, genuine expertise, and a clear point of view. (I find the Ahrefs stat both motivating and depressing — motivating because it means most of your competition isn't even trying, depressing because the bar for "trying" is apparently very low.) Organize your content into topical silos so the internal structure reinforces your authority signals, and accept that 10 excellent pages will do more for your DA than 100 mediocre ones. We learned this the hard way at SEOJuice — our tool pages drive all our backlinks, while most of our early blog content earned exactly zero.
When I ran our own internal linking audit last year, I found 34 pages on seojuice.io with zero internal links pointing to them. Orphan pages. They existed on our site, had decent content, but were completely invisible to both users and search engines because nothing linked to them. I added internal links from related pages, and within two months, three of those previously-orphaned pages started ranking for their target keywords.
Internal links don't directly increase DA — DA is primarily about external signals. But they distribute the authority you've already earned more effectively. Think of it like plumbing: your homepage and most-linked pages are the main water line. Internal links are the pipes that carry that pressure to the rest of the house. Without them, you've got rooms with no water.
We built an internal link finder in SEOJuice specifically because manual audits are tedious and error-prone. The tool crawls your site and suggests link opportunities between topically related pages. The most surprising finding from building that tool was how consistently sites under-link their best content. The pages that most deserve internal links, comprehensive guides and pillar content, are often the ones with the fewest links pointing to them internally. Implementation takes days; the indirect DA effect through improved crawlability and link equity distribution shows up over 2-4 months.
I'm not going to rehash technical SEO basics. Fix your crawl errors, submit your sitemap, pass Core Web Vitals, don't let robots.txt block important pages. If any of that isn't done, that's your actual problem, not DA. I've seen sites fix a single robots.txt misconfiguration and watch 200 pages get indexed within a week. The DA impact was indirect but real.
The one thing I will say: if you're planning a domain migration, treat your 301 redirect map as the single most important document in the project. We haven't migrated SEOJuice from .io to .com yet, but I've been researching it obsessively, and every case study I've read says the same thing. Mess up the redirects and you lose years of accumulated authority overnight.
This is speculative territory, and I want to be upfront about that. We've been tracking AI search visibility through our AISO monitoring features, and I've noticed some patterns that are interesting but not conclusive.
Higher-DA sites do seem to get cited more frequently in AI-generated answers — in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews. But I'm not sure whether that's because of DA itself or because the same factors that produce high DA (quality content, strong backlink profiles, established brands) are also the factors that AI models use to determine source credibility.
Here's what I can share from our own AISO tracking data: across the sites we monitor, those with DA above 40 get cited in AI-generated answers at roughly 3x the rate of sites below DA 20. That sounds like DA matters a lot — until you realize that the DA 40+ sites also have better content, more structured data, and stronger topical coverage. I can't separate the DA signal from the "these sites are just better" signal. Not yet, anyway. (This is the kind of question that keeps me up at night. If DA is just a proxy for "overall site quality," then improving DA by building quality content would also improve AI visibility. But if there's something specific about backlink-derived authority that AI models weight independently — then the strategy changes. I don't have the answer. Nobody does.)
My working hypothesis: AI systems are trained on data that includes link graphs, and those link graphs encode authority signals similar to what DA measures. So DA might be a rough proxy for "how likely is an AI to cite you," even if the AI isn't looking at your Moz DA score directly. I wonder if the relationship is logarithmic too — I mentioned the logarithmic scale earlier for DA itself, and it would make sense if AI citation probability follows the same curve where each incremental point of authority matters less as you go up. I haven't tested this yet.
I don't know if this will hold up as AI search evolves. The ranking factors for AI citations might diverge significantly from traditional search factors. But for now, the correlation is there, and I think it's worth paying attention to. If you're curious about how your site performs in AI search specifically, that's a separate topic — and one we're actively building tools to explore.
No. Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz, and Google has confirmed they don't use it. However, the underlying signals that DA measures — particularly the quality and quantity of backlinks — are factors that Google considers. And the 2024 API leak revealed Google has their own internal "siteAuthority" metric, which suggests they do care about site-level authority, just not Moz's version of it.
Realistically, 3-12 months to see meaningful movement, depending on where you're starting and how competitive your niche is. Going from DA 5 to DA 20 can happen in a few months with consistent link building. Going from DA 40 to DA 55 might take a year or more. The logarithmic scale means each point gets harder to earn as you go up. Don't trust anyone who promises significant DA gains in 30 days.
Domain Authority (DA) measures the overall strength of your entire domain. Page Authority (PA) measures the strength of a single specific page. You can have a high-DA site with some low-PA pages, and occasionally a low-DA site will have one or two high-PA pages that outrank much stronger domains (usually because those specific pages earned a lot of quality backlinks). Both are Moz metrics, and both use the same 1-100 logarithmic scale.
Yes, and it's more common than people think. DA can drop for several reasons: you lost backlinks (sites that linked to you removed the links or went offline), Moz updated their algorithm and recalibrated scores, or higher-authority sites entered your space and the relative scale shifted. DA is comparative — your score depends partly on everyone else's scores. A DA drop doesn't necessarily mean you did something wrong. Check whether your backlink count actually decreased before panicking.
Moz uses a machine learning model that evaluates dozens of factors, with the most heavily weighted being your backlink profile — specifically the number of unique referring domains and the quality of those linking sites. Moz also factors in spam score and other link-based signals. They train the model against actual Google search results to predict ranking likelihood. The exact algorithm isn't public — even Moz's own documentation is somewhat vague about the relative weights, which is part of why the metric feels like a black box — and it gets updated periodically, which is why scores can shift even when nothing about your site has changed.
It can — temporarily. But bought links tend to come from low-quality or PBN (private blog network) sites, which means they'll either get ignored by Moz's spam filters or actively hurt your score when detected. Worse, if Google identifies bought links pointing to your site, you risk a manual penalty that tanks your actual rankings. The risk-reward ratio is terrible. One manual penalty can undo years of legitimate SEO work. Build links through content quality and outreach instead. It's slower, but it's the only approach where the gains stick.
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