What is domain authority, and is it a Google ranking factor? Domain authority (DA) is a third-party score from 1 to 100, created by Moz, that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search. It is not a Google ranking factor. Google has stated repeatedly that it uses no domain-wide authority score. DA is a competitive yardstick, not a number Google looks at.
So if you've been told to "raise your domain authority" to win at SEO, the honest version is this: you're chasing a number Google never sees. That doesn't make DA useless. It makes it widely misunderstood. Here's the real definition, who calculates it, how much it should matter to you, and what to do instead.
What is domain authority, in plain English
Domain authority is a single 1-to-100 score that estimates how competitive a website is likely to be in organic search. A brand-new site sits near 1. The internet's heavyweights (Wikipedia, major news outlets, the platforms you already know) sit in the 90s. Most real businesses live somewhere in the middle and spend years nudging the number up.
The thing nobody tells you cleanly: DA is not made by Google. It's made by Moz, an SEO software company. It's their model's best guess at how Google might treat a site, trained against real search results. Useful as a guess. Still a guess. Still third-party.
The score is also logarithmic, not linear. Climbing from 20 to 30 is comparatively easy. Climbing from 70 to 80 is brutal, because every point higher means competing with sites that have spent a decade earning links. So if your DA has "stalled" in the 40s or 50s, that's often not a failure. That's the math working as designed: the curve is supposed to flatten as you climb.
Who calculates domain authority
This is where the confusion starts, because there isn't one "domain authority." There are competing brand-name versions from different tools:
| Metric | Made by | Scale | What it leans on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain Authority (DA) | Moz | 1-100 | Machine-learning model over Moz's Link Explorer index, trained against real Google results |
| Domain Rating (DR) | Ahrefs | 0-100 | Strength of a site's backlink profile in Ahrefs' index |
| Authority Score | Semrush | 0-100 | Backlinks, organic traffic, and spam signals combined |
Moz's DA evaluates a wide set of link signals, with the number of unique linking domains weighted heavily, and feeds them through a model retrained periodically against fresh Google data. Two things follow from that. First, your DA can move even when you've changed nothing on your site: the model updated, not your website. Second, the score only knows what's in Moz's index, so a perfectly good backlink Moz hasn't crawled yet simply doesn't count toward your number until it does.
Bottom line: DA, DR, and Authority Score are three companies' separate opinions of the same site. They will not match, and you shouldn't expect them to. None of them is Google's opinion, because Google doesn't publish one.
Is domain authority a Google ranking factor? No.
Let's kill the myth directly, because it drives a lot of wasted budget.
Google does not use Moz's Domain Authority. It doesn't use Ahrefs' Domain Rating or Semrush's Authority Score either. Google's John Mueller has said this plainly and repeatedly, including a 2020 statement that "Google doesn't use Domain Authority at all when it comes to Search crawling, indexing, or ranking," and he reiterated through 2025 that third-party authority metrics aren't ranking factors. Google has also said it doesn't have a single website-wide authority score of its own.
So why does the myth survive? Because DA correlates with ranking. Sites with strong link profiles tend to both rank well and score high on DA, since both are downstream of the same thing: other reputable sites linking to you. DA didn't cause the ranking. The links did. DA just measured the shadow they cast.
Treat DA as a thermometer, not a thermostat. It tells you the temperature. It doesn't set it. Optimizing the thermometer doesn't warm the room.
What domain authority is genuinely good for
DA isn't worthless. It's just misused. Where it earns its keep:
- Competitive benchmarking. Your DA next to three competitors' DA is a fast read on whether you're playing in the same league or a different one. That context is real, and it's usually the first number we pull in an SEO audit before we recommend anything.
- Tracking trend over time. The absolute number matters less than the direction. A DA climbing steadily over six months usually means your backlink profile is genuinely strengthening.
- Vetting link opportunities. Considering a guest post or partnership? The other site's DA is a quick (imperfect) sniff test for whether a link from it carries weight. It won't catch everything, but it filters out the obvious junk fast.
- Estimating difficulty. A keyword's competitiveness often tracks with the DA of the sites already ranking for it, which is why DA quietly underpins a lot of keyword difficulty scoring.
What DA is not good for: as a goal in itself, as a promise to a client, or as proof an SEO campaign is working. "We raised your DA by 8" is a vanity line. "We earned you links from 14 relevant publications and your non-brand traffic is up" is the actual work. The DA bump is a side effect of that, not the point.
How to "raise" domain authority (the honest version)
You don't optimize DA. You earn the things DA measures, and the score follows. There's no button, no service, and no shortcut that legitimately moves the number on its own.
What moves it:
- Earn links from relevant, reputable sites. Unique linking domains are weighted heavily, so ten links from ten different real sites beat a hundred links from one. Quality and diversity over raw volume, every time. This is the slow, unglamorous core of link building, and it's the single biggest lever on the number.
- Publish content worth linking to. Links are earned, not requested. The asset comes first: original data, genuinely useful guides, and clear answers get cited, while thin pages get ignored. That's why a real content marketing program does more for DA than any outreach campaign bolted onto a site nobody wants to link to.
- Fix the technical foundation. Crawlability, site structure, and clean internal linking help your earned authority flow where it should. That's the technical SEO layer, and it's the part most people skip because it's invisible from the outside.
- Mind your anchor text. Natural, varied anchors on inbound links read as organic. A wall of identical exact-match anchors reads as manipulation and can backfire.
- Be patient and avoid the shortcuts. Buying links to juice DA is the fastest way to a Google penalty, which tanks the rankings DA was supposed to predict. Bought links can lift a third-party score while quietly torching the real thing.
Notice that none of these are "DA tactics." They're just good SEO. The score rises because the site got stronger, which is the only order that has ever worked.
Stop optimizing the thermometer
If an agency is selling you "domain authority improvement" as the headline deliverable, you've found a red flag, not a strategy. (It's worth knowing the other warning signs while you're at it.) They're charging you to move a number Google doesn't read. We'd rather earn you the links, content, and authority that move rankings, and increasingly get you cited in AI answers, then let DA climb on its own as the side effect it is.
That's the whole point, explained in the open, which is how we do everything. Want a straight read on where your site stands and what's worth fixing first? See how we do SEO, check what SEO costs, or email admin@moonsauceagency.com and book 30 minutes. No quote-form games, no pressure, no vanity metrics.
Related: What is a backlink? · What is keyword difficulty? · What is anchor text? · Browse the glossary
