What Is Domain Authority and Does It Matter?

If you’ve spent any time reading about SEO, you’ve almost certainly come across the term Domain Authority (DA). It’s thrown around constantly — in agency pitches, blog posts, and tool dashboards — as though it were an official Google metric. It’s not. Domain Authority was created by Moz, a third-party SEO software company, as a way of estimating how well a website is likely to rank.

That doesn’t make it useless, but it does mean you need to understand what it actually measures and what it doesn’t before you put too much weight on it. This guide explains what DA is, how it’s calculated, and how to think about it as part of a broader SEO strategy.

What Domain Authority Actually Measures

Domain Authority is a score from 1 to 100 that Moz assigns to websites based on a machine learning model trained to correlate with Google rankings. The primary input is the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your site — specifically, how many unique domains link to you and how authoritative those domains are themselves. A brand-new site starts at around 1. Established, heavily linked sites like the BBC or Wikipedia score in the 90s.

Other tools have equivalent metrics: Ahrefs uses Domain Rating (DR), Semrush uses Authority Score. They’re all trying to estimate the same thing — link authority — but they use different data sets and formulas, so scores will differ between tools. None of them are Google signals.

Does It Affect Your Google Rankings?

Google has confirmed it does not use Domain Authority or any equivalent third-party metric in its ranking algorithm. Google has its own internal assessment of site quality and authority, built on signals that are not publicly disclosed. So a DA of 40 doesn’t directly cause you to rank higher than a site with DA 20.

However, there’s a strong correlation between high DA and high rankings because both are influenced by the same underlying factor: quality backlinks. If your DA is growing, it usually means you’re earning more and better links, and those links genuinely do help your rankings. The metric itself isn’t the cause — it’s a proxy for something real.

How to Improve Your Domain Authority

Since DA is primarily driven by backlinks, the way to improve it is to earn more links from high-authority, relevant websites. Publish content other sites want to reference, pursue guest posting opportunities, get listed in reputable directories, and build relationships with journalists and bloggers in your industry. Removing toxic or spammy backlinks through Google’s Disavow tool can also help if your link profile has been polluted by bad links.

Don’t obsess over the number. A site with DA 30 that ranks on page one for its target keywords is more valuable than a site with DA 50 that ranks on page four. Use DA as a directional indicator rather than a target in itself, and keep your focus on creating useful content and earning relevant links.