What is domain authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric created by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search results. It scores domains from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater ranking ability. Google doesn't use DA directly — it's a third-party approximation of Google's internal authority signals.

How DA is calculated: Moz considers the number and quality of backlinks pointing to your domain, the linking domains' own authority, and the overall link profile diversity. A single link from nytimes.com (DA 95) is worth more than 1,000 links from unknown blogs (DA 10).

DA benchmarks: new domain = DA 1-10, small business after 1 year = DA 10-25, established business = DA 25-45, industry leader = DA 45-70, major publication = DA 70-95. Improving DA by 5 points takes 6-12 months of consistent link building.

Similar metrics: Ahrefs uses Domain Rating (DR), Semrush uses Authority Score, Majestic uses Trust Flow. All measure roughly the same thing with different methodologies.

Important: don't optimize for DA itself. Optimize for real ranking by building quality content and earning natural backlinks. DA follows as a side effect. Some sites with DA 30 outrank DA 60 sites on specific keywords because they have better content and more relevant backlinks for those topics.