What is Domain Authority?

Why It Matters

Domain Authority gives SEO teams a fast way to size up whether a keyword target is realistic before committing content and link-building resources to it. Watching it move over time, alongside actual ranking and traffic data, shows whether link-building efforts are compounding or stalling. Because it's a third-party estimate rather than something Google publishes, treating it as the goal instead of a proxy is a common mistake that leads teams to chase the score itself rather than the rankings and traffic it's meant to predict. It's most useful in a relative sense, comparing a site against its actual ranking competitors, rather than as an absolute target number. Ignoring it entirely, though, means losing an early signal for how hard a competitive landscape will be to break into.

Example

A newer site with a Domain Authority of 15 is competing for the same keywords as an established competitor with a Domain Authority of 62. That large gap suggests the newer site will generally struggle to outrank the competitor on competitive terms until it builds a comparable backlink profile, which is why Domain Authority is commonly used to size up the difficulty of a competitive landscape before investing heavily in a keyword target, even though it's a third-party estimate rather than an official Google ranking signal.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Is Domain Authority a Google ranking factor?

  No. Google has stated it does not use Domain Authority in its ranking algorithm. It's a Moz-built prediction tool, useful for competitive benchmarking but not something Google itself measures or references.

• How is Domain Authority different from Domain Rating?

  Domain Authority is Moz's score and Domain Rating is Ahrefs' equivalent score. Both estimate backlink profile strength on a similar scale, but they run on different indexes and algorithms, so the two numbers for the same site are rarely identical and shouldn't be compared directly.

• What counts as a good Domain Authority score?

  There's no universal good number, since it only means something relative to the sites actually ranking for a given keyword. A score of 40 might be strong in one niche and weak in another, depending on what the top-ranking competitors look like.

• How often does Domain Authority update?

  Moz recalculates it on its own schedule, typically monthly, as it recrawls the web and refreshes its link index, so the score a site sees today reflects Moz's most recent crawl rather than real-time changes.

• How do you raise a site's Domain Authority?

  The main lever is earning more high-quality backlinks from other authoritative, relevant sites, since link quantity and quality drive the underlying model. Removing toxic or spammy backlinks can also help, since those can drag the score down.