What is Domain Authority? How Does It Affect Your SEO and How to Increase It
<p>Domain Authority (DA) is a metric from Moz that predicts a website's ranking potential on Google, on a scale of 0–100. It is not an official Google factor but serves as a reference to compare domains and measure SEO progress.</p>
Domain Authority (DA) is a metric created by the company Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank its pages in Google’s search results, on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the DA, the stronger the domain — but it is a third-party metric, not an official Google factor.
What is Domain Authority
Domain Authority was created by Moz to try to replicate, in a simplified way, how Google assesses the strength of a website. Google does not use DA as a ranking factor — it uses PageRank (internal) and hundreds of other signals. DA is an approximation created by the SEO industry to facilitate comparative analyses.
Even though it is not an official Google factor, DA is widely used in the market to compare competing sites, evaluate link building opportunities, and measure the evolution of a domain over time.
A new site starts with a DA between 1–10. Established sites like major national portals have a DA between 60–90. For a local business, a DA of 20–30 is already sufficient to compete locally.
How DA is Calculated
Moz’s DA is calculated based on:
- Number of backlinks — external sites pointing to your domain
- Quality of links — DA of the site that links to you
- Diversity of domains — links from 100 different sites are worth more than 100 links from the same site
- Spam Score — presence of low-quality links
Other providers have similar metrics: Domain Rating (DR) from Ahrefs, Authority Score from SEMrush, Trust Flow from Majestic.
What Influences Domain Authority
Increases DA: backlinks from high DA sites (newspapers, portals, industry references), quality content that other sites want to cite (glossaries, guides, studies), mentions in the press, guest posts on relevant sites, link building through partners and associations.
Decreases or stagnates: links from spam sites, new domain (DA takes time to grow), few indexed pages, superficial content without depth.
How Much DA Do You Need to Rank?
There is no magic number — it depends on who you are competing against. The practical strategy: search Google for your main keywords and analyze the DA of the top 10 results using the Moz Bar or SEOquake extension. If competitors have DA between 15–30, you can already compete. If they have DA above 50, focus on long-tail keywords or invest more in link building.
How to Increase Domain Authority
- Produce linkable content — glossaries, comprehensive guides, studies, and comparisons are the most cited
- Active link building — partnerships and guest posts on industry blogs and portals
- Media relations — appearing in local newspapers and portals generates high DA backlinks
- Associations — ACIJ, FIESC, CDL often have business directories with backlinks
- Remove toxic links — use the Google Disavow Tool to reject spam links
- Be patient — increasing DA is the result of months and years of building
Related Terms
- Keywords — DA determines for which keywords you can rank
- SEO — DA is one of the metrics for tracking an SEO strategy
- ROI — link building has long-term but lasting ROI
- Sales Funnel — linkable content usually serves the top of the funnel (TOFU)
- CTR — content that generates backlinks also improves organic CTR