Off-Page SEO
Domain Authority
Domain authority is a third-party score, on a 1 to 100 scale, that predicts how likely a domain is to rank, based largely on its backlink profile.
It is useful for comparing sites against each other, but it is not a Google metric and Google does not use it to rank you. Treat it as a directional benchmark rather than a target to optimise directly. The popular versions come from tools like Moz and Ahrefs.
Authority scores are logarithmic, which is the detail most often missed when they are used to set targets. Moving from 20 to 30 takes a fraction of the work that moving from 50 to 60 does, so a flat annual target treats two very different jobs as the same. They are also computed from each tool's own crawl, which means the same site scores differently across tools and neither number is wrong. Use them for what they do well, which is triaging a list of link prospects quickly. Use referring domain counts and actual rankings for reporting.
Example
An outreach list of 80 sites gets triaged by DR: everything under 20 is dropped, everything above 40 gets a manual look. That is the metric doing its job. The misuse: a client target of "DR 45 by December", which the team hits by acquiring worthless high-DR directory links while rankings stay flat. The score moved; nothing it was meant to predict did.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Domain Authority a Google ranking factor?
- No. It is a third-party prediction created by SEO tool vendors, not a metric Google uses or publishes. It works for at-a-glance site comparisons and for filtering link prospects, but chasing the score itself is not a strategy.
- Which authority metric should I actually track?
- Track something you can act on: referring domains from quality sites, rankings for commercial terms, and organic traffic to money pages. Vendor scores like DA or DR are convenient shorthand for prospecting, not goals in themselves.
Related terms
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