What does domain authority mean?

Domain authority (DA for short) is a score between 1 and 100 that is calculated from a range of factors and is meant to express how significant a website is. Which factors go into it depends on the tool doing the calculation, because every vendor takes its own approach. The score originally comes from the tool vendor Moz.

How can I measure the domain authority of my own site?

Moz offers a few free tools that display the score, for example the MozBar browser extension. At a glance it shows the DA next to the PA (page authority), the links and the spam score.

Which values influence the domain authority?

• Age of the domain or website
• Security (encryption and similar)
• Backlinks (backlinks from dubious websites push the score down)
• Many more

Which domain authority values are good or bad?

Large international corporations such as Google, Apple or Microsoft often sit at a DA between 99 and 100. Chasing that number is rarely realistic for a smaller website. Look for comparison values from other websites in your own industry or region instead. As a rule of thumb, a DA above 30 is a starting point worth aiming for.

What influence does domain authority have on SEO?

Whether the DA score has a direct influence on rankings is not clear. What is clear is that a site with a high DA has a clean backlink structure and a low spam factor. For good search engine rankings that is certainly no disadvantage.

In short: the higher the domain authority of a website, the more valuable a link from it to your own site.

How does domain authority play out in SEO contests?

In theory, domain authority is a helpful orientation. In the practice of search engine optimization, and in SEO contests in particular, the picture is more nuanced. In competitions around invented terms such as this year’s contest term Serponado, every participant starts from zero.

That makes one thing visible: a high domain authority buys a head start in trust, but it is not the ticket to success on its own. An SEO contest forces optimizers to raise their domain authority actively and within a very short time, through targeted link building and topical relevance.

For website owners that means:

• Topical relevance beats raw DA: a link from a page with a DA of 20 that covers exactly the same topic is often worth more than a link from a page with a DA of 80 that has nothing to do with the subject.
• Quality before quantity: building strong domain authority is not about collecting links blindly. It is about building a network that backs up the authority of your page in the topic field you want to own (for example everything around Serponado).

Domain authority is therefore less of a high score you simply reach and more the result of consistent, clean off-page work as part of an SEO strategy.