Domain Authority
Also called: DA, Moz DA
Domain Authority (DA) is a metric from Moz that scores a website from 1 to 100 to predict how likely it is to rank in search results, based mainly on the strength of its backlink profile. It is a third-party estimate, not a signal Google itself uses.
What the score actually measures
Moz built DA with a machine-learning model trained on real search results, then tuned it to correlate with how sites rank. The heaviest inputs are backlink signals: how many unique sites link to you (linking root domains), the total number of links, and the quality of those links. Other tools ship their own versions of the same idea, like Ahrefs’ Domain Rating and Semrush’s Authority Score, using similar link-based math.
Two things trip people up. First, the scale is logarithmic, so moving from 20 to 30 takes far less work than moving from 70 to 80. Second, DA is a relative number, not an absolute grade. A DA of 40 can look strong in a quiet niche and weak in a field full of national publishers, so it only means something next to your direct competitors.
The caveat that matters most: Google does not use it. John Mueller has said plainly that “Google doesn’t use Domain Authority at all” for crawling, indexing, or ranking, and that Google does not count links at the domain level. DA is a convenient proxy for link strength, not a score any search engine reads back. Treat it as one gauge among many, and watch the trend over time instead of fixating on a single number on a given day.
How it affects your traffic
DA rarely moves on its own; it climbs when you earn links from new, relevant referring domains, which is exactly what a link building program produces. Use it to benchmark your backlink profile against the competitors you are trying to outrank, then track the trend before and after a campaign. Keep the real goal in view: rankings and referral traffic, not the score itself, since Google does not read DA. Our Link Building work targets the relevant, editorially earned links that move both the metric and the results underneath it.
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