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Anyone who’s spent enough time in SEO will have come across Domain Authority (DA) before. You’ll find it in nearly every single SEO report, audit, analysis, link sheet, etc.
But what does it actually mean? And should you be prioritising it in your SEO strategy?
What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority is a metric that was developed by Moz, a popular third party SEO tool. Similar SEO tools use this same metric, sometimes with a different name and calculate it slightly differently too. For example, ahrefs.com has a Domain Rating metric.
A website is given a DA score between 1-100. The higher the number, the more authority the website is said to have and therefore the more likely it is to rank in search engines. Not only that but rank competitively for difficult terms.
DA is calculated based on the following:
- The number of linking root domains
- The quality and relevance of backlinks
- Website structure and SEO health
It is important to mention that DA is NOT a Google metric and is only used by third party tools for SEO purposes.
Does Google Use Domain Authority?
No. Google does not use the metric Domain Authority as a ranking signal.
There are over 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm and Google’s John Mueller has stated that Google does not consider DA.
Domain Authority is simply used as a relative measure, particularly for SEOs like ourselves when doing competitor analysis against websites ranking for keywords we are targeting. Typically if a website has a higher domain authority, it is worth checking out their SEO, including backlink profile and overall site health to see what can be replicated or further improved for our client’s sites.
Why Does it Matter?
As mentioned it is not a Google ranking factor, so why does it matter at all? Well, it does hold value in SEO.
You can see how your website stacks up against competitors. For example, let’s say we have a client wanting to rank for the term “online casino” with a Domain Authority of 5, we will explain to them that this would take a considerable amount of time and investment, considering right now as I’m writing this, here are the Domain Ratings of the Top 10 competitors in the US for the term “online casino”, according to ahrefs.com: 73, 80, 82, 70, 75, 77, 96, 74.
Client Case Study Example
We have been working with a client in the gambling industry to improve their SEO through link building. This client is already authoritative in the gambling industry, having been around for a long time and actually has gambling shops across the UK.
They came to us as they wanted to outsource their link building to a specialised iGaming SEO agency. Having seen that this company was already an authoritative brand, without maximising their SEO, we knew we could get results quickly.
Below, you can see an image which shows the quick improvements in clicks and impressions for our client, over the last 6 months, compared against the 6 months prior to when we started building backlinks for them. It is also important to mention that this is for non-branded keywords only.
One of the main reasons as to why this happened, apart from doing extensive research to find high quality, relevant link building opportunities, was because they already had authority in this industry.
This proves that whilst Google does not use Moz’s metrics or any other third party tool in its ranking algorithm, it does consider Authority as a trust signal, leading to better rankings.
Domain Authority Can Be Fabricated?
Firstly it is important to mention that Google does consider genuine authority. For example if your website has trust signals from other very high quality sources, this will certainly benefit your website. However, third party SEO tools, like Moz, can fall victim to fabricated metrics, Domain Authority being one of them.
One of the main aspects that DA is calculated from is the backlink profile of the website. The more backlinks a website has, typically the higher the DA. Of course quality beats quantity but you can still gain a relatively high DA from lots of backlinks, even if most of them aren’t genuine, trusted websites.
This can skew the data on SEO tools, leading to a website seemingly having a strong DA score, but when you delve deeper into their backlink profile, you find that there aren’t any links from genuine, trusted sources and it is full of “spam” sites and link farms.
This is one of the main reasons why Domain Authority alone is not a metric to go off when building links and it should be considered alongside other metrics such as referring domains, trust score, keywords, organic traffic, niche and more.
Different Tools, Different Score
Another important reason as to why Domain Authority alone is not enough to go off when finding link opportunities is because different tools use different scores. Ahrefs uses Domain Rating (DR), Semrush has Authority Score, Majestic has Trust Flow. Each uses different algorithms.
It also doesn’t reflect the quality or intent. It’s not always the case that a higher DA means better rankings as you will find lower DA sites ranking higher based on the quality of the site overall and the intent.
So, Does Domain Authority Matter?
Yes – but only in context.
As a standalone metric, Domain Authority is not enough to indicate the quality of a website and should be taken into consideration alongside other important metrics and ranking signals that Google have confirmed to us.
Whilst it is the case that genuine high quality websites will represent a strong DA score, you will also find that other websites, of much lesser quality can fabricate their metrics and share the same DA score through other blackhat techniques.
When mapping out an SEO strategy for your website or one of your client’s websites, use DA, DR or other similar metrics from various SEO tools as a guide and not as a definitive goal.
